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Folk It: How the Past might be the Future
In the wisdom of aphorism, he who forgets the past is condemned to repeat it. The mistakes made by people who are long gone should be, by this estimation, illumination along the path of life today. The problem that arises from the adage, though, is that it is impossible to remember every past. If history is written by the victor, as another proverb goes, then the history of the vanquished is forgotten. On the level of the day-to-day, history is complied in the culture of a people. Colloquialisms, folktales, land ownership, patterns of dress, local industries—they all tell the story of the people and place to which they belong. So what happens when a people is stripped of its history? What would it be to reclaim forgone culture; could a people recover from cultural and literal banishment to reignite lost illuminations and be guided into a future that might not have been?
In her writings on the people of her hometown, Zora Neale Hurston compiles the “lies” of the men of her southern African American culture. The lies are oral tradition’s folktales that have been passed down through generations. Hurston’s collection of them reflects her understanding of their importance as cultural artifacts and also as art. She says, “From the earliest rocking of my cradle, I had known about the capers Brer Rabbit is apt to cut and what Squinch Owl says from the house top. But it was fitting like a tight chemise. I couldn't see it for wearing it. It was only when I was off in college, away from my native surroundings that I could see myself like somebody else and stand off and look at my garment. Then I had to have the spyglass of Anthropology to look through at that” (Intro). This native ethnographer realized the value of the content of her home culture only when she was able to view it from a somewhat outside perspective. She also came to realize the transitory nature of the material. When being asked why she would want to record old African American folktales, Hurston responded, “They are a lot more valuable than you might think. We want to set them down before it's too late” (Ch. 1). Hurston saw how the tales could disappear over time and be lost. She also saw how influential the folktales had been on her own young life, and that their formative power was a large segment of the local culture of these people.
In the Marco Williams documentary, Banished, the issue of culture is linked more closely to geography and land ownership. The film delves into parallel incidents in which the African American populations were run out of towns in the post-Reconstruction South. The descendents of the banished families attempt in different ways to reclaim their heritage in the towns where their family land has been resold by legal if unethical means. After the African American population was expelled from the town, laws covering “adverse possession” of land meant that squatters could claim “abandoned” land and eventually own it legally. In the film it is clear that the present populations in the towns are Euro-American and that the history of the banishment of all the African Americans in that township has been covered over, recast, or forgotten in earnest. Both the African American families and Euro-American townspeople seem to find the situation of generational reparations to be an awkward subject to broach.
The tensions in these works seem to exist across the racial and social divide of the Euro-American majority and the African American Minority. Banished makes it clear that apart from a few in the community, there is little across the divide attempt to truly understand both positions. One woman in Pierce City, Missouri, tries to bring about a compromise for a descendent looking to honor his buried forefather in the cemetery. Others in the same town (and the film stacks the numbers in this case) seem unable to find a polite word to use for African Americans, and seem hostile to address any discussion of racial disharmony. Hurston approaches a similar subject. “We smile and tell him or her something that satisfies the white person because, knowing so little about us, he doesn't know what he is missing. The Indian resists curiosity by a stony silence. The Negro offers a feather bed resistance, that is, we let the probe enter, but it never comes out. It gets smothered under a lot of laughter and pleasantries” (Intro). Not only is there an appreciation for the depth of African American minds, but there is also a concerted effort to keep others out of it. Hurston seems to be saying that the African American is consciously separated from his or her Euro-American peers.
So, the world is left with the inability to move toward understanding. People are left with holes in their understanding of personal cultural history. Can culture be reclaimed? Through the works of Hurston, culture has been preserved to survive (at least in the Academy) for another generation. In the efforts of the families in Banished, it seems that some small steps are being made to reassertion of native identity. However, it occurs to me that the assertions of these people are not so much of being ingrained as vital parts of a larger community, but rather as finding lost keys to the past. Is personal and familial history enough to merit or claim culture? In Hurston’s account, it seems that culture is about community. “As early as I could remember it was the habit of the men folks particularly to gather on the store porch of evenings and swap stories. Even the women folks would stop and break a breath with them at times” (Intro). The social aspect of culture seems predominant. But, in the words of one more phrase turner, Thomas Jefferson, “A morsel of genuine history is a thing so rare as to be always valuable.” So maybe the pieces collected are enough to be a start; after all, culture wasn’t created in a day, neither can it be restored so quickly.
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I have a headache. And I included a note with my online posting of this essay that I thought my ethnic terminology seemed off-putting, but I didn't really know what to do about it.
T
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