8 - History as Storytelling

Summary

The soothsayers who found out from time what it had in store certainly did not experience time as either homogeneous or empty. Anyone who keeps this in mind will perhaps get an idea of how past times were experienced in remembrance – namely, in just the same way.

– Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940: 264)

What is happening in the world more and more is that people are attempting to decolonize their spirits. A crucial act of empowerment, one that might return reverence to the Earth, thereby saving it, in this fearful-of-Nature, spiritually colonized age.

– Alice Walker, “Clear Seeing Inherited Religion and Reclaiming the Pagan Self” (1997: 54)

Young poets sit in their rooms

like perverted Penelopes,

unraveling everything,

kicking the threads

into the wind …

– Jay Wright, “Death as History” (1967: n.p.)

In 1976, during the national enactments of the Bicentennial, Jay Wright published Dimensions of History (Corinth) and Soothsayers and Omens (Seven Woods Press), two independent sequences of poems dealing with the cultural and aesthetic imperative to construct an enlarged historical path into the cultural geographies of the diaspora. Like Ezra Pound's Cantos, these collections are more than poems “containing history”; they are active attempts to reconstruct the very method and modes of the aestheticized historical, the energized field of narrative threads: storytelling and national (de) construction. For Wright, nationalisms serve as oppositional sponsors of an emerging aesthetic of history.