SOURCE: “‘These Are the Facts of the Darky’s History’: Thinking History and Reading Manes in Four African American Texts,” in African American Review, Vol. 28, No. 2, Summer, 1994, pp. 223-35.

In the following essay, McKible analyzes the definitions of power and identity in the context of naming in Jones's Corregidora, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Octavia Butler’s Kindred, and Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose.

In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it. … Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.

(Benjamin 255)

We are rooted in language, wedded, have our being in words. Language is also a place of struggle...