Narration: Oral Tradition

Wideman's narrative technique in "The Beginning of Homewood" is related to the development of his Afrocentric point of view. By the time in his career when he was writing the stories that make up Damballah, Wideman had shaken off the single narrator perspective of his earlier fiction and had merged his interest in the modernist prose of Faulkner and James Joyce with his concern to write about the African-American experience. The resulting narrative technique attempts to render in prose aspects of the African-American oral traditions of storytelling and call and response. In an interview with James Coleman, Wideman explains how he came to adopt these new techniques: "In the later books also I began to understand how in using Afro-American folklore and language I didn't have to give up any of the goals that I was after when I was using more Europeanized and more traditional...