Remembering The Past: On John Edgar Wideman's Homewood Trilogy

Under the harsh oppresion of the cruel racism and the cultural hegemony policy, the African Americans live in the lowest level of the society. In order to survive in the whiten world, some African Americans are just assimilated by the dominant culture and lose their own identities, thus lose their roots. John Edgar Wideman shows his concern about the African American cultural crises in his Homewood trilogy Damballah, Hiding Place and Sent for You Yesterday. How to find their place in a white world, or to construct the African American identity has become an urgent problem for the contemporary African Americans.Mainly based on the perspective of "collective memory" from French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, the thesis makes clear that Wideman reveals the traumatic memories on the slavery and the impact on the contemporary African Americans through the analysis on the Homewood trilogy. The traumatized African Americans would rather forget or reject the traumatic past full of humiliation. However, slavery is the collective memory of the African Americans, a key part of African American culture.Since the past keep haunting in African Americans' lives and preventing them from a new life, the thesis also explores the way to recover from the past. To change the future is to give meaning to a common past in new ways. It shows that the African Americans can not recover from the past until they face the past in the process of constructing their identities.Wideman tries to remind the contemporary African Americans that one must know his past to ensure their culture passed on in America and to construct the distinct identity of African American based on the African American traditions and cultures.