a little stuck

i'm a little stuck on Meridian right now probably because I haven't really sat down and dedicated time to writing out the statements in the chapter. i could do this tomorrow morning i suppose because work is so flexible right now.

so anyway though i'm stuck because i'm trying to build an argument about the book as post-civil rights trauma but what is the trauma? what is being healed? the trauma is the white patriarchal power military system that isn't even white or patriarchal, it's just violent, military, suppressive, humanistic, and all of the ways that we interact with it position some people in the shittiest places who then are raced, gendered in specific ways. so i guess then that i'm saying that walker's vision in this text is so humanistic, but also so honest, that meridian has to die, she has to be sacrificed, because of where and how she is positioned in the face of the power system. that stinks.

Bambara's solution is different. the level of optimism? it's not optimism or hope. but just the level of discovery, just what she can get away with, i think--what seems possible. these texts in their social positions are responses to the trauma of the civil rights era. the trauma of that era is civil rights violations, disgustingtons. so as traumatic responses, as resposnes to traumatic events--i need to decide where that signifier goes, what is the trauma. in Meridian it's the power of the tank, of white supremacy in bell hooks' sense. oooh that's good! i can so use bell hooks here to define what she's positioning herself against when she faces the tank!

it is a specifically political novel--find when she talks about Ruby, who the novel is supposed to be about. the centrality of black women to that political struggle as an unwritten history. not that though really but just the truth of Ruby Robinson's death, the seriousness of that, the struggle and commitment and lack of truth and honor now present, and the tank still dominating.

and so. guess i do have a lot to say after all! thank goodness. all it takes is time and effort, silently, over and over again.

love self!