-Sigmund Freud, Uncanny

The concept “rememory” was invented by Morrison to fight against disremembering slave history. “recalling both remember and memory, ‘rememory’ is both verb and noun; it names simultaneously the process of remembering and the thing remembered”

-Valerie Smith

Some of the greatest stories ever written, in fact what are called epic, has been duplicated, imitated and reinvented so that it has what structuralist would say an archetype. Getting is start in structuralism through its concern with structures, briefly moving through psychoanalysis to its very own theory (with the help of thinkers and critics as Northrop Frye, Carl Jung by way of Sigmund Freud and Joseph Campbell) “Advocates of archetypal critism claim that archetypes impose a “structure” on works of literature and that the job of archetypal critic, “is to help readers see the “structures” of what they read by identifying literature’s organizing patterns of convention, genre and archetype. Like any other structural element, archetypes are potential but not inevitable places of meaning.”(185, Griffith)So just proving the John Edgar Wideman’s protagonist Orion in Damballah, whose name is deliberate, being named for a hunter hero from Greek mythology doesn’t say much about what’s going on but only to give light of my first “r” resistance much like martyrdom equals heroism. But to further explore Damballah using what Swiss psychologist Carl Jung’s “collective unconscious” which is essentially the combination of uncanny and rememory, being the concept of “historical associations and communal “memories” I intent to look at how these things repression and rememories shaped and/or propelled our protagonist into a heroes journey. By positioning Damballah in the archetype of a hero tale, part of some of the greatest stories ever written through intertextuality of epics that came before I intent to bring into question the environment (institutions)of the hero that needed to be resisted.

 In this paper I attempt to show what the heroes journey looked like in African American literature under the American Chattel Slave system, using the “collective unconsciousness” in the form of repression and rememory to show the brutal nature that blacks were faced with by being under a perpetual state of uncanny.

When we meet the protagonist Orion he is in full postmodern doom and gloom. “Orion let the dead, gray cloth slide down his legs and stepped into the river.” (17, Wideman) The character is naked an we have the foreshadowing of death by the description of an one a thing that is already dead a cloth and two by a dying color gray. This death, the gray is approaching, our hero is watching the “distant gray clouds” which the paragraph goes on to say, “The promise of rain coming to him as all things seemed to come these past few months, not through eyes or ears or nose but entering his black skin as if each pore had learned to feel and speak.” (17, Wideman) The world around Orion is gray, it is in a sense cold and he is naked and alone. “He watched the clear water race, ripple an pucker…he could see the bottom, see black stones, speckled stones, shining stones whose light came from within.” (17, Wideman) Orion is fully awakened; he is working with a higher level of senses, than most which makes him different. Orion through the text we lean have all the attributes of the archetype for a hero as charted by scholar and authority figure on the myth and the heroes journey Joseph Campbell. In his book “The Hero with a Thousand Faces” (pieced throughout the book) he says, “the usual hero adventure begins with someone from which something has been taken…it’s usually a cycle and the acceptance of death is an important facet.”(Campbell)Orion is a slave, he has been stolen away from all he knows and by law/death must repress all he knew. When we meet our character Orion he is fully grown, and had lived successfully in this system up till our meeting of him because in another scene in the book he is lacking the ability to fish as he remembers the men in his village use to fish by talking to the fish tricking them into their baskets because he was stolen away before he could lean this trick an also through a letter that his slavers write to another slaver expressing dread by purchasing Orion (both of which this paper will address later). So if the first separating of something wasn’t enough the second separating, having something being taken away did the job of propelling our character onto this journey.

Here at the beginning there is intertextuality, “meaning writing or reading one text in relation to another” (54, Parker) that can be followed with this story and earlier hero tales. Orion is alone, in a strange and brutal place; he is different in not just his actions of resistance to the powers that be, but different in a sense of his senses (i.e. magic) that connects him to his ancestral place, that helps him to face his fate and complete his mission of finding the one before he is unable to keep what’s inside separate from what is outside. Damballah is in constant contradiction and tension with itself (binaries), between past and present, between resistance and assimilation, between living and dying, between those living and those not living (the living; Orion and the boy and the dead ancestors/ ghost) and between Orion and the boy. Rememory explained by Toni Morrison of her book “Beloved” she writes, “A re-memory differs from a memory because it can be shared. The collective nature of slavery created re-memories, known to more than one person. Even those who never shared in the experience can know the terror.” (6, Gaiman) And the tone of this story was in a state of a collective uncanny.  Orion who have “hooded eyes”, who has brought back to life through his rememories his ancestors from across the sea, is living between the past and the present, he knows where his journey ends and he is not afraid, but his mission is to find the one before he is called home. The tension and uncanny comes from his resistance to speak and eat ever again what the white man eat, how he speaks, total resistance. The boy (who has no name),who could be “the one,” is also living between worlds his dissatisfaction with his status on the plantation and his idle time allows for his communication and gain knowledge of ghost and to beable to follow our hero. His sense of uncanny is with not being allow the passage into adulthood and having to participate in menial jobs and listen to what he calls animal stories from “the old woman” who is overseer to him and probably all the other children on the plantation. The other characters, the other slaves sense of uncanny comes in via the threatening behavior of Orion or as they call him Ryan by his slave name. The other slaves see him as a threat to their survival because they know they all are subjected to the emotions and whims of the slavers. And the slavers who are first jaded because of the purchase of a non-performing slave and secondly they will not have him influences their others slaves they too are under a constant fear of revolt and resistance.

This collective uncanny also sets up further attributes of our hero and how the hero is seen by others. We learn from the text that everyone has distant themselves from our hero, Aunt Lissy the “old woman” the boy is yearning to break from, tells the boy, “that Ryan, he a crazy nigger. One them wild African niggers act like he fresh off the boat. Kind you stay away from less you looking for trouble.” (18, Wideman)  Again the hero travels alone, he is set apart from everyone.

               The archetype of the hero’s journey follow a set (in an about) of three parts and twelve stages[1] as scholar Joseph Campbell laid out in his study of the monomyth. Orion is “call to action” taking clues from a letter written from one slave owner to another about the purchase of Orion, the reader can gather that being removed from one plantation to another alone could have done the trick to get our hero going, the reader could assume he was separated from his wife and/or children for in the letter it says of Orion, “a full grown and able-bodied house servant who can read, write, do sums and cipher” (22, Wideman)he was at one point a functioning well-learned and for this paper assimilated slave, it goes on to say, “I have seen nothing. Not an English word has passed through his mouth since he arrived. Of his docility and tractability I have seen only the willingness with which he bares his leatherish back to receive the stripes constant misconduct earn him.” (22, wideman)

               In the story we find our hero near the end of the journey close to the return, or rather in an accelerated version of the journey. In remembering what Campbell said about the stages of the hero journey we can concur with what “Northrop Frye, a preeminent advocate of archetypal criticism, defines archetype as, “the recurring use of certain images or image clusters” in literature. More broadly, archetypes can be defined as any repeated pattern in literature, whether of plot, character, themes, settings, or images,” (183, Griffith) as I breakdown Ryan’s journey.

                 Orion has already been “stolen away” from his home, ventured into a “new world”, the meeting with the mentor is his rememory of the ancestors, reimagining their voice and action in the opening river scene where, “In his village across the sea were men who hunted and fished with their voices. Men who could talk the fish up from their shadowy dwellings and into the woven baskets slung over the fishermen’s shoulders.”(18, Wideman) He has his recollection of his memories, and sense of uncanny because he know the river, he knows the fish, but he is forgotten by them, the proper words and tones of communication has been cut-off when he was stolen away, but the image of his memory is still here; “Orion thought of the eldest priest chalking a design on the floor of the sacred obi. Drawing the watery door no living hands could push open, the crossroads where the spirits passed between worlds.” (18, Wideman) even though he is in a “strange land” a “blood-soaked land” where “everything was different” (18, Wideman) he sees the people as clear as the water.  Crossing the threshold is his awareness and his ability to find “that quiet place in the middle of the river” where he could hold on to for now and keep “separate what was inside from everything outside.” (18, Wideman)

               The next stage in the hero’s journey is test, allies and enemies which is shown in how the others view him and his resistance to the oppression, “he understood that he would never speak the language of these fish. No more than he would ever speak again the words of the white people who had decided to kill him,” which could also be looked at as “the white gaze” although others (meaning other slaves or other blacks) view him in the same way as the slavers, he is a threat to their survival. Next step is to approach the innermost cave, everything he knows nature, his own skin lets him know he is dying, “His skin was becoming like that in-between place the priest scratched in the dust. When he walked the cane rows and dirt paths of the plantation he could feel the air of this strange land wearing out his skin, rubbing it thinner and thinner…Some days his skin whispered he was dying. But he was not afraid. (17, 18 Wideman) The whippings he has entered everytime he has resisted has given something magical via the scarring of the black body that has opening his senses up to be received, the scarring worked as an aid to awakening to his “hooded eyes,” being able to fix the boy so he could implant the word Damballah into him. The ordeal is that he knows his time is almost up and that the boy could be the one yet it is an ordeal because “This boy born so far from home. This boy who knew nothing but what the whites told him.” (18, Wideman), was a hard case but was the only one offered. The reward is the boy is the one. “the boy was there again hiding behind the trees….Pine needles crackled with each step he took, and the boy knew old Ryan knew somebody spying on him. Old nigger guess who it was, too. But if Ryan knew, Ryan didn’t care. Just waded out in that water like he the only man in the world. Like maybe wasn’t no world.” (19, Wideman) The boy with no name is also representative to the hope that the future can bring, he is representative of anyone, everyone who will help bring an end to this ugly system but more so who can remember and tell the stories of our past. Orion “standing there like a stick in the water till the fish forgot him…A skinny-legged, black waterbird in the purring river….Orion move…Not so much a matter of seeing…as it was feeling the man’s eyes inside him, hooking him before he could crouch lower in the weeds. Orion’s eyes on him and through him boring a hole in his chest and thrusting into that space one word Damballah.” (20, Wideman) and Ryan brakes half the overseer’s bones by knocking him off the horse. The road back Orion faces his mistress and master instead of running away, he faces up to his fate. The resurrection was the boy was not afraid to enter the barn and Orion is able to tell the boy the stories he is to learn and retell. Although the act has been done, what the foreshadowing has kead us to, what Aunt Lissy has told to Primus another slave who was in the cooking shed with an the boy overheard, “They gon kill that simple nigger one day.” (21, Wideman)the sense of the uncanny was still there, the plantation was quiet, everyone afraid to go near the barn, even the “helter skelter” way the barn was left in by the slavers proved to be a chilling site, “In the morning light the barn swelling and rising and teetering in the yellow dust, moving the way you could catch the ghost of something in a spoon and play with it, bending it, twisting it. That goldish ash on everybody’s bare shins. Nobody talking. No cries nor hollers from the fields.” (24, Wideman)

               There lays a collective unconsciousness that again has touched everyone. And the next passages takes the reader back to the gloom of the beginning of the story, with the boy watching seeing what Orion saw in the beginning of the story where Orion saw light coming through the trees, the boy sees light coming through the cracks of the barn, in a dark patch of the barn like that dark patch of water there are flies buzzing unnaturally loud congregated and where it was the pores of Orion, here it is the wooden walls of the barn’s breathing. The boy moving in automation retrieves the head from the barn, and he let his legs take him where he needed to be, “the boy wiped his wet hands on his knees and drew the cross and sad the word and settled down and listened to Orion tell the stories again. Orion talked and he listened and couldn’t stop listening till he saw Orion’s eyes rise up through the back of the severed skull and lips rise up through the skull and the wings of the ghost measure out the rhythm of one last word.” (25, Wideman)The mission has been completed, the boy was the one and he was able to talk to Damballah and follow the instruction for Orion to complete the mission.

               The final stage of the heroes’ journey is to return with the elixir, Orion leaves his body acquires wings and returns home with the ancestors. “Freud and Jung signify flight as a symbol or transcendence, an escape from disagreeable situation. Or as Jung is interpreted by John Henderson: Flight as a symbol points “to man’s [sic] need for liberation from any state of being which is too immature, too fixed or final.” (21, Wilentz)As with other African American tales flight has signified with our psychoanalysis and has also meant death or runaway.

The intertextual dialog from Damballah can be seen in some of today’s most popular, contemporary hero archetype[2] that follows the twelve stages shown from Wideman story in this paper. In some of the hero archetype the hero encounters a woman, sometimes as a form of test or temptation, in Damballah, Orion after almost killing the overseer we know through the character Aunt Lissy who “she said it time for Orion to die. Broke half the overseer’ bones knocking him off his horse this morning and everybody thought Ryan done run away sure but Mistress come upon the crazy nigger at supertime on the big house porch naked as the day he born and he just sat there staring into her eyes till Mistress screamed and run away.” (22, Wideman)  The fate of our hero isn’t the fate of the boy. The boy is not looking to follow the footprints of our hero and in fact the boy yearns to be with the men in the field and not to resist like Orion, the boy is the hope; for the past to be kept alive in the present. It is the hope that we no longer need to repress the past, the traditions but the hope that one day there can be a balance where the memories of the past will no longer haunt us because the stories will be known and retold.

               In Damballah it tells us the the boy is moving in automation, he is doing exactly what he needs to do without much thought and to him reason. But the reader can say that everyone in the tale is doing exactly what they need to be doing if following what the collective unconscious is and how this uncanny feeling effects the other characters. The slaver’s wife whom Orion looked into her eyes before they captured him, Aunt Lissy says, “shes still locked away crying, her husband shock is “still down on slaves row” the men charged with killing Orion are gone off scathered, just as chaotic as the scene, And the slaves are quiet, not even wanting to go get Orion letting days and night past with no one even entering the barn. The slaves have internalized the rules and repressed their culture and tradition so that like in Historical and cultural studies, they had begun to police themselves, if they want to survive. All the characters after Orion death is moving in this collective unconscious space of uncanny. All trying to suppress this episode and use it as a warning when the time comes, except the boy and our hero who are both freed of one thing or another. This is the story happening beside the hero’s journey. The social, political side of this African American hero’s journey that is the what, whys and hows of the story being moved.

               Our hero was able to move and function as a hero with the audience of one, the boy with the connection of two worlds, who is also representative of blacks who can be successful in living in the new strange place. The one who can live between two worlds; not the living and the dead but the old and the new world, to balance inside this strange world inside the constant uncanny state of everyone involved. And to be able to remember the traditions and stories without repression them to the point of being haunted by them.

Work Cited

Campbell, Joseph. The Hero With a Thousand Faces. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University

 Press, 1949.

Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed

Gaiman, Neil. “The Sandman and Joseph Campbell: In Search of the Modern Myth.” Wildside

 Press, 2003.

Griffith, Kelley. Writing Essays About Literature. Boston: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning,

 2013. Print.

Parker, Robert D. How to Interpret Literature: Critical Theory for Literary and Cultural

 Studies. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Print.

Wideman, John E. Damballah. New York: Vintage Books, 1988. Print.

Wilentz, Gay. “If You Surrender to the Air: Folk Legends of Flight and Resistance In African

 American Literature” MEKUS, Vol. 16, pp 21-32, www.jstor.org/stabel 467579. Web