Retelling our selves: collective memory and the body in Charlotte Watson Sherman's 'One Dark Body.'

African American Review, Summer, 1998 by Nicholas Sloboda

Sherman shows how a local African American community in a small town turns to its ancient social and cultural customs to come to a better understanding of themselves and, at the same time, to deal with past injustices and acts of oppression. In particular, she examines the reciprocity between ritualistic (or symbolic), body-centered experiences and other, remembered orders of thought and expressions of being, and how this interrelationship contributes to the ongoing formation and expression of identity. As her characters become aware of and respond to primordial bodily gestures, they encounter both personal recollections and collective cultural memories or mysterious "dreamstories" through which they renegotiate their own presence, at once embodied and represented, individual and historical. Recognizing the importance of maintaining such a dialogue between the past and present, the individual and social, Sherman affirms Trinh T. Minh-ha's contention that "remembering, understanding, and creating what we have heard together" remains essential for our "coming into being" and the expression of "the story of a people" (119). Sherman presents such moments in her novel as integral to the reformation of identity, both on personal levels and across generations. With families divided and relationships torn apart due to individual and social injustice and violence, Sherman both unveils the harsh reality facing an African American family in small-town America and points to the redemptive value of body-centered and memory "dialogues" between a mystical past and the material present.

Attending to cultural expression as a living continuum and dynamic system (and not a static and closed hierarchy), Sherman shares discursive worlds with other major contemporary African American writers. Like Morrison, Sherman establishes a dialogue between African American and feminist points of view. In Beloved (1987), Morrison not only examines the traumatic effects of violence but also shows how it seeps down from society to the family. Her inclusion of apocalyptic events - simultaneously catastrophic and revelatory - and a reappearing, embodied ghost is comparable to Sherman's presentation of visionary experiences - at once traumatic and symbolic - and recurring, otherworldly voices. Through such scenes, both authors review individual and social histories, at once exposing the destructive effects of prolonged racist and exploitative treatment and showing how awareness of history and culture allows for regeneration and transformation. Also recognizing the tension between the past and present, Gloria Naylor, in Mama Day (1989), juxtaposes life in Willow Springs, an island off the South Carolina-Georgia coast dominated by the spiritual and mysterious, with New York City, an island regulated by capitalism and rationalism. Similarly, Sherman intertwines life in the small town of Pearl, and its familial and social strife, with secret or "holy" areas in the woods or by the local pond, where cultural legends and ancient spirituality are maintained. With Naylor's Cocoa and Sherman's Sin-Sin choosing lives that mediate between the quotidian and spiritual worlds, both authors show how a better understanding of the natural and supernatural can emancipate the individual and social subject. Further addressing the need for renewal or revitalization on both familial and spiritual levels, Alice Walker points to the empowerment of otherwise suppressed, often female, voices. Celie and Shug in The Color Purple (1982) talk about rejecting not only the "white man" but "man" in general as a mediator between women and the world. Sherman also casts a critical eye to the preponderance of white; male-dominated power structures in society and unveils their destructive influence on African American familial and social life. The active bond Celie, Sofia, and Shug form as sisters, symbolized by the quilt - "Sister's Choice" - that they knit together, correlates to the development and solidifying of a female and family bond in Sherman's text between mother and daughter. In general, Sherman's tripartite attention to oppression and violence - past and present - in the African American community, the extraordinary and supernatural in the quotidian and empirical world, and cultural and spiritual expression in both its American and African traditions should afford her writing a relevant and meaningful position within studies of contemporary African American fiction.

Sherman situates the body as central in her characters' attempts to communicate with each other and, at the same time, themselves - a process through which they learn to look at the world anew. To draw attention to the "body," at once physical, psychological, spiritual, and social, Sherman includes an epigraph from W. E. B. Du Bois's frequently cited The Souls of Black Folio. "One ever feels his twoness, - an American, a negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder" (45). Her use of the expression one dark body as the title of her novel not only echoes Du Bois's description of simultaneously feeling "twoness" in one body, as an "American" and a "negro," but also refers to ancient African conceptions of the self as a unity of body and mind. Throughout the novel, the characters attempt to interpolate this historical-cultural paradigm with their contemporary social praxis. The body emerges as both a physical site and spiritual presence in which the self is anchored and through which contact is made with the empirical world, with other living beings (especially through breathing and touching), and with social groups, including both real people and spirits or ghosts. The result is a re-visioned subject and world, both simultaneously changing yet consistent, in which inner and outer worlds come together, as do the past and present.