Power to Undo Sin: Race, History and Literary Blackness in Rilla Askew's Fire in Beulah, The

Askew's narrative approach goes a step further. She accomplishes the difficult task of appropriating the role of blackness in her narrative voice. In the words of Derrida, she "speakfs] the other's language without renouncing [her] own" (qtd. in Gates, 1992, 66). Derrida s words, however, have not been readily applicable for white authors writing black characterization and plots.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Toni Morrison have often demonstrated that blackness itself becomes a signifier, and black texts retain a unique intrinsic, self-reflexive critical stance that must be appropriated.5 This notion is central to Gates's discussion in Tlie Signifying Monkey (1988) and in Morrison's Playing in the Dark (1993). Similarly, in Loose Canons, Gates argues that "Race has become a trope of ultimate, irreducible difference between cultures, linguistic groups, or practitioners of specific belief systems, who more often than not have fundamentally opposed economic interests. Race is the ultimate trope of difference because it is so very arbitrary in its application" (1992, 49). He introduces The Signifying Monkey with a related claim:

The black tradition has inscribed within it the very principles by which it can be read. Ours is an extraordinarily self-reflexive tradition, a tradition exceptionally conscious of its history and of the simultaneity of its canonical texts, which tend to be taken as verbal models of the Afro-American social condition, to be revised. (Gates 1988, xxiv)

Because of concerns related to this tradition, Askew must then appropriate blackness as signifier if she is to successfully write the black experience into fiction. The nuances of what is signified, generally the oppression of people whose history predates Oklahoma statehood, needs to be specifically attended in matters of dialogue and scene development if the blackness of the novel is to succeed. Her attempts should satisfy the concerns of Gates and Morrison. She faithfully dignifies a people whose history entitles them to claim Oklahoma as their Promised Land. Such careful signification is necessary, obviously, since the non-white claim to Oklahoma remained unfulfilled for so long. Askew's fiction subverts a flattering mainstream projection of itself, an image based on the deeply entrenched notion in the Southwest that non-whites being biologically and culturally inferior.

Askew's Fire in Beulah could be read as a modern variation, or at least a logical extension, of the slave narrative that gives voice to the African-American struggle, reasserting the crimes of 1921 onto the consciousness of a reading public.6 As "blacks . . . tried to write themselves out of slavery" (Gates 1992, 66), Askew writes them out of the obscurity of a hidden traumatic past in Tulsa and environs where Jim Crow laws and a "conspiracy of silence" (Madigan qtd. in Nossiter 2001, 33) had suspiciously and effectively maintained a master-slave hegemony.

Askew exercises a remarkable risk in crossing over into the domain of the other. Despite the understandable notion of some African American critics that black history, characterization and dialogue should remain in the domain of black authors, Askew nonetheless, pursues her course. The obvious narrative distance (between black reader and white author, black character and white author, black character and white reader, history and contemporary society, etc.)7 is bridged somewhat by the overt narration (informing of historical details) with which Askew writes. In Fire in Beulah, she mostly uses an omniscient narration that informs the reader of the relevant historical contexts and social milieu. Though she might be criticized for a sometimes "overwrought style" (Nossiter 2001, 33), her narrative approach is clearly subversive. Her subversiveness makes sense when her plot structure is considered: parallel stories of two women from opposing classes and cultures reverse the presupposed positions of each character and the culture and class each represents.