The interconnection between nature and history in US ethnic magical realist novels

Abstract

This article examines the interrelated reflections of (American) nature and history in six American magical realist novels mainly written in the 1980s. For this purpose, the authors explore Louise Erdrich’s Tracks, Gerald Vizenor’s Bearheart, Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day, Leon Forrest’s Two Wings to Veil My Face, Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men, and Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club. Each of the storytellers in these novels has an ulterior purpose that instigates their long sessions of storytelling in the world of the novels. The storytellers in all the novels believe that their narratives are a means of re-defining or consolidating a communal ethnic identity. Although they often depict the domestic lives of their peoples, yet at another level, their narratives undertake to rewrite the geography and history of their ethnicities from their own points of view and in response to mainstream historical narratives. The way they represent their race, nation, and the landscape wherein they have lived, this article will show, plays a crucial role in the process of identicization. The narrators’ accounts share a number of thematic concerns; yet, they respond differently to their conditions due to their varied perceptions of marginality in the American society and their cultural discrepancies. The narrators in these magical realist novels, this article concludes, do not necessarily always lament the destruction of Nature, nor do they all feel at home in the Americas, and although almost for all of them the remembrance of the past is vital, hardly is it nostalgic and romanticized.

Keywords

• nature
• history
• storytelling
• communal ethnic identity
• native american
• african american
• chinese american
• magical realist novel