SOURCE: Weets, Tatiana. “The Negotiation of Remembrance in ‘Across the Wide Missouri’.” Callaloo 22, no. 3 (summer 1999): 727-39.

In the following essay, Weets asserts that the role of music and pictures in “Across the Wide Missouri” “underlines the help necessary to tell a story and signals the shortcomings of writing as a mode of preserving memories.”

Damballah, published in 1981 by John Wideman, is a text with numerous screening thresholds that cannot be crossed without due preparation. In fact, for the uninitiated reader, the assemblage of letters constituting the book's title corresponds to no previously encountered meaning. The title's opaqueness thus performatively announces the central issue of the book: how can memory be transcribed into words and given readable form. The sign “Damballah” only serves to visually and phonetically trace a rich curve with vowels and consonants alternating in a ternary mode and in which there is an oscillation between the...