Walking On Water by Randall Kenan - Review by Walton Muyumba

WALKING ON WATER: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century
Walton Muyumba

WALKING ON WATER: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century By Randall Kenan Alfred A. Knopf, 1999 New York 672 pages Hardback: $30.00

Randall Kenan's new book, Walking on Water, is written in the tradition of classical American travel literature. Yet uniquely, this travelogue, historical archive, memoir, ethnographic survey, and literary documentary addresses the complexities inherent in discussions of identity and race.

The author is best known for his fiction: his novel, A Visitation of Spirits, and a critically acclaimed collection of stories, Let the Dead Bury Their Dead. The blend of his elegantly wrought prose and impeccable historical documentation makes Kenan's impulse for exploration resonate with importance.

Kenan's Walking on Water enterprise, eight years in the making, was ignited by this set of "basic" questions: What does it mean to be a Black American? What exactly is African American culture? Who is Black? All are extremely unruly questions to pose, let alone answer. Rather than sift through these complicated matters alone, Kenan presses others for their interpretations.

The author avoids the most redundant settings. Instead of dwelling on the fecundity of Chicago's "Blackness," he ventures to Grand Forks, N.D., and Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, for sounds from the "lower frequencies." Kenan travels to almost every regional quadrant and he introduces a cadre of folks -- artists, activists, students, and politicians -- whose narratives destabilize any notions of an "essential" Black experience or culture.

Kenan masterfully presents historical background for every area. He tells the story of the Black soldiers of the Army Corps of Engineers who built the most treacherous portion of the Alcan (the Alaskan-Canadian) highway. In San Francisco, Kenan ruminates on the cultural, political, and economic power of Mary Ellen Pleasant, confidante and financier behind the abolitionist, John Brown. Woven throughout is Kenan's voice guiding, suggesting, and surprising us with new ways to think about ourselves.

It is mind-boggling to read the multifarious explanations of what constitutes Blackness. From Clara Villarosa at the Hue-Man Experience Bookstore in Denver, to the Creoles and Black Frenchmen of Lafayette, La., to Herbert Heughan in Maine, there are no concrete answers to Kenan's questions. And yet, the variety of the voices transcribed to life by Kenan urge the reader to follow him to the book's end. Interestingly, Kenan may answer his interrogatives when he suggests that long before the term was coined, "Black culture was a postmodern culture; folks made it up as they went along. Therefore, who can be authentically Black, when every Black person holds the codes and blueprints of that Blackness?"

Indeed, it seems difficult to chart racial authenticity -- after all, isn't race a false category? There is no essential experience except for that ubiquitous moment when race is used by the "powers that be" to authorize, essentialize, ostracize, oppress, condemn, and murder black, brown, and beige bodies.

However, race -- Blackness in this case -- still has political necessity. There is a need for unity among Negroes to "band together against discrimination, to fight for parity, to safeguard against injustice inherently aimed at a person solely because of his or her skin color." Is the I snake swallowing or giving birth to itself?

One should take this book on, if for no other reason than to reconsidering how we imagine our individual relations to Blackness. Kenan extends the overtures made by recent, excellent memoirs like John Wideman's Fatheralong, Anthony Walton's Mississippi, and Deborah McDowell's Leaving Pipe Shop.

The remarkable quality of Kenan's book is that it is utterly his own, stylized and rendered in his unmistakable voice. It is buoyed by the clarity of the informants he includes within. Among other things, Walking on Water articulates that the attempt to work out our preoccupations with race and culture is attached to travel and exploration -- and that this remains a part of our American make-up. Walking on Water will become a movement in the journey worth revisiting again and again.

-- Walton Muyumba is a writer and a doctoral candidate, completing a dissertation on the philosophical aspects of the blues and African American literature at Indiana University.

COPYRIGHT 1999 Cox, Matthews & Associates
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning


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