The Power of Rememory
I first understood the concept of “Rememory” after reading August Wilson’s literature. August Wilson’s agenda as a playwright was to capture the African American experience and display it in such a way that readers would know the history that belongs to African Americans.
In books which recount the United States of America’s history, there is often a lack of information on the lives of the common African American who came to the Americas as cargo to be sold as slaves. In more recent years, there has been an effort, by major publishers, to erase and alter certain aspects of the history. For example, Mcgraw-Hill suffered criticism in 2015 for calling African’s who were brought over in chains “workers”. There is even publicized confusion among the African American community regarding perceptions on African-American history.
In order to eliminate the whispered manner of teaching the stories of African Americans, Wilson resolved to rewrite African American history through the art of writing plays. Wilson did this by incorporating the literary technique of rememory into his plays. With Gem of the Ocean, Wilson threaded the themes of going to the past to find healing and the power of history to redeem to convey the importance of knowing the truth about the past to progress towards forgiveness, self-fulfillment, and happiness.
The method of someone’s revisiting and reconstructing their memories of the past in the effort of helping themselves or someone else to better understand their present state of life is the application of rememory. The memories that are often called upon are usually the harshest, and the most vivid, and they typically lay buried beneath years of life and the attempt to forget. Ultimately, rememory allows the person who relives the memory to get past pain to achieve contentment. The concept of rememory is stitched throughout August Wilson’s play Gem of the Ocean. The play is set in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1904. The year was not too far removed from the end of slavery and many African Americans were migrating from the south to the north during this time. The play is in some sense, Wilson’s own rememory of the importance of the Hill District mixed with his imagination of what it was like when the many African Americans were journeying from south to north.
In the scale of the play itself, many of the characters apply the technique of rememory in order to assist the play’s antagonist, Citizen Barlow, to find redemption and inner peace. Citizen, a recent immigrant, enters the stage as a man seeking atonement from Aunt Ester, the community matriarch. He fidgets while waiting across the street under a streetlamp and refuses to “come back on Tuesday” as Eli tells him. From the very beginning, Citizen is a man haunted by something from his past. He does not wait until Tuesday to return to Aunt Ester’s home. When she confronts him in her kitchen, he asks her if she is the one who washes souls. At this moment, Aunt Ester is caught allowing Citizen into her memory as she revisits the face of her son, Junebug. This is the first, though subtle, application of rememory in Gem of the Ocean. From this moment, Citizen and Aunt Ester develop a rapport and he tells her his reason for needing his soul washed.
The play is also a reflection of the effect of rememory on the entire African American community. This is evident through the community of characters preparing to sojourn with Citizen as Aunt Ester takes him on a paper boat called the Gem of the Ocean, to her very own memory which she has named the City of Bones. The City of Bones is the memory of all slaves who experienced the Trans-Atlantic trade in which the slave ships made the long trek from the shores of Africa to the Americas. The group of travelers that went with Citizen and Aunt Ester was Black Mary, Eli and Solly Two Kings. Each character was able to assist Citizen on his journey because they had been through many journeys already. For instance, Solly Two Kings and Eli were both conductors for the Underground Railroad and they had led over sixty people to freedom during slavery.
Once Citizen shared his memory, he was able to get the advice he needed from Aunt Ester, and he began his journey to atonement. Citizen’s reliving the memory of his sin was what allowed him to be cleansed. He was hiding from himself and he had not forgiven himself for being the cause of another man’s death. The larger meaning of rememory in Gem of the Ocean was the community’s willingness to forgive one man, even when he was the reason for an innocent man’s loss of life.
