SOURCE: "Negotiating between Tenses: Witnessing Slavery after Freedom—Dessa Rose," in Slavery and the Literary Imagination: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1987, New Series, No. 13, edited by Deborah E. McDowell and Arnold Rampersad, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987, pp. 144-64.

In the following essay, McDowell examines issues of identity, discourse, and textuality in Dessa Rose.

How could she bear witness to what she'd never lived?

                     —Gayl Jones, Corregidora

History is "cannibalistic," and memory becomes the closed arena of conflict between two contradictory operations: forgetting, an action directed against the past, and the return of what was forgotten.

—Michael de Certeau, Heterologies: Discourses on the Other

Judging from the flood of recent novels about slavery by black Americans, Ralph Ellison is not amiss in remarking that "the negro American consciousness is not a product of a will to historical forgetfulness" [Ellison et al., "The Uses of History in Fiction...