Revisions of the Oral: Orality and Sexuality in John A. Williams's The Man Who Cried IAm

Abstract

As contemporary American fiction evolves, new visions of the oral and folk must be employed to ensure the growth and future of a literature sure to become more multi-cultural. African-American literary critics often seek theoretical approaches to African-American literature through folk and oral traditions. These traditions demonstrate a concern with power, marginality, and language. Oral and folk traditions also suggest ways for artists to solidify their “marginal” cultural/ethnic aesthetics, heritage, and social concerns in American literature. My paper examines how the African-American literary tradition and its modes of orality continue to contribute to the making of contemporary fiction. I see the oral tradition as a valuable tool in exploring the black body and sexuality in the African-American literary tradition. I examine how the oral tradition in African-American literature works to deconstruct gender and sexual social orders through eroticized structures of voice in the text. In implementing the practice of such theory, the second purpose of the paper seeks to examine certain tropes of orality and sexuality in John A. Willliams’s The Man Who Cried I Am. By examining the mythic sexualness of the black male, the voice of grotesqueness and violence, and the empowering effects of oral rituals, I explore how the text uses the power of the erotic ( in orality) to aid African Americans in the process of learning to own their bodies and voices without “Othering” themselves in the process. Revisions of the oral tradition ensure new writing and critical techniques for the future of contemporary American fiction.