Abstract
The need to find our place—the spot where we belong—in the world is pervasive and, as Josephine Hart suggests, we are ill at ease until we, “with the shock of recognition,” identify a place where our souls can call “home.” Here home is not just a matter of birthplace but, rather, it is where our souls are at ease and, like water, are confident in their ability to adjust to innumerable possibilities as to what shape they might take. Home is where we slip into place.
There is an internal landscape, geography of the soul; we search for its outlines all our lives.
Those who are lucky enough to find it ease like water over a stone, onto its fluid contours, and are home.
Some find it in the place of their birth; others may leave a seaside town, parched, and find themselves refreshed in a desert. There are those born in rolling countryside who are really only at ease in the intense and busy loneliness of the city.
For some, the search is for the imprint of another; a child or a mother, a grandfather or a brother, a lover, a husband, a wife, or a foe.
We may go through our lives happy or unhappy, successful or unfulfilled, loved, without ever standing cold with the shock of recognition, without ever feeling the agony as the twisted iron in our soul unlocks itself and we slip at last into place.
Josephine Hart, Damage (1991)
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Notes
Wilson Jeremiah Moses calls this an “Afrocentric perspective” toward African American historiography. Here there is attempt to marshal the “remarkable diversity of languages, customs, and physical characteristics among “black” Africans” into a representative or “composite African.” See Wilson J. Moses, Afrotopia: The Roots of African American Popular History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 19.
Kristin Mann, “Shifting Paradigms in the Study of the African Diaspora and of Atlantic History and Culture,” in Kristin Mann and Edna G. Bay, eds., Rethinking the African Diaspora: The Making of a Black Atlantic World in the Bight of Benn and Brazil (Oregon: Frank Cass, 2001), 3–21.
Cited in Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay et al., The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, 2nd ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 2004), 132–133.
Victor Anderson, Beyond Ontological Blackness (New York: Continuum, 1995)
William H. Hardy, Reflections: An Anthology of African American Philosophy (California: Wadsworth/Thomson Learning, 2000), 414–423.
Saira Shah, The Storyteller’s Daughter (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), 25.
Frederick Copleston writes, “If one admits, as one must, that historiography is more than mere chronicling and that it involves selection and interpretation, it becomes very difficult to draw a hard-and-fast line between historiography and philosophy of history. However, when we find historians interpreting history as the working-out of some kind of general plan or reducing historical development to the operation of certain universal laws, it is reasonable to begin speaking of philosophy of history.” See Copleston, A History of Philosophy: Volume, Modern Philosophy: Descartes to Leibniz (New York: Image Books, 1963), 62.
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© 2009 Zachery Williams
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Lake, T. (2009). Speaking of Africa and Singing of Home: The Trope of Africa in African American Historiography. In: Williams, Z. (eds) Africana Cultures and Policy Studies. Contemporary Black History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230622098_13
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