The discussion we had about archives the other day really got me thinking—specifically, about my cousins. My mom’s brother died of an aneurysm about 20 years ago, a month or two before his second kid was born. Both of his kids are desperate to hear what he was like, constantly asking my mom the most inane questions. One particular moment I remember was about three years ago at thanksgiving when my cousin put a scoop of chocolate ice cream on her apple pie. My mom, not even thinking, mentioned that her brother did the same thing when he was alive. I swear, I didn’t think I’ve ever seen my cousin that excited.
In Moran’s Interdisciplinarity, he states that “Unless we are solely concerned with the mechanical and formal properties of language, sooner or later we have to start dealing with the relationship between words and their referents, or between literature and ‘the outside world’” (Moran 19). We have to understand what came before us, what influences us as people, and what created us before we are truly able to understand who we are. It’s the same with literature.
That’s the only way I’m able to understand both Toomer’s desire to return to his roots in Cane, as well as how characters in Meridian, as Dr. McCoy put it, “are struggling to understand both themselves and other people”. Within Cane, Toomer often references people returning to their roots like with Song of the Son, when he writes “One plum was saved for me, one song becomes/ An everlasting song, a singing tree,/ Caroling softly souls of slavery” (Cane 17-18). Toomer obviously understands the importance of understanding the past, how important it is to our personal identities. Toomer felt exploring his father’s roots in Hancock County, Toomer learned that he sometimes passed for white. Seeing the life of rural areas led Toomer to identify more strongly as an African American and with his father’s past. He knows that his identity is largely influence with what came before him—not just his father, but with his ancestors—and there is no way he can ignore or escape that truth.
I just think it’s interesting that what predates us—things we weren’t even alive for—has such a major and impressive impact on our lives and who we are. Neither of my cousin’s met their father, and yet they thirst for any bit of information about him.
Olivia, I really enjoyed reading your post, particularly what you mentioned about how the past, “what predates us–things we weren’t even alive for,” can affect our identity in ways we cannot even fathom. It reminded me a lot of a Radiolab podcast I listened to recently. The podcast talks about antibiotics and how, though extremely effective, they only last for a certain amount of time before they stop working. It goes on to tell the stories of two women, one a micro-biologist, the other an Old English historian who, in reading an Old English book on medicine, by looking back to the past, were actually able to recreate an ancient remedy that functions as an antibiotic today. As it says in the summary of the podcast, this discovery “makes us reconsider our most basic assumptions about human progress and wonder: What if the only way forward is backward?”
http://www.radiolab.org/story/best-medicine/