Generations, a History Composed of Disparate Parts

By James Freyland

Pervasive throughout the teaching of American history in the US is the notion that an objective account of said history is being taught. At its core, this claim can appear to be accurate — after all, history is supported by irrefutable proof to support the existence and effects of the people discussed. However, subjectivity is introduced in the valuation of a person’s historical significance, and the decision of who to include in school curriculums. This valuation is inherently biased against women; our country, with a near-even gender split, is malapportioned to school history standards, including “approximately 1 woman for every 3 men.” The breakdown of the women included provides an even starker misrepresentation of this country’s demographics: “48 percent [of Gen Z]… are from communities of color,” and yet are expected to feel represented by standards that are “still 62 percent white.” The effects of this misrepresentative history on women are ontologically profound, affecting what it means to be a woman — creating a scholastically imposed narrative where “fact and proof and history [become] … lies [that] are true,” and women are excluded. Recent years have seen a further curtailing of whose stories are taught in the classroom, further limiting the development of an inclusive historical narrative. In light of these setbacks, one can find solace in literature’s ability to illuminate, even if not taught in the classroom. Lucille Clifton’s Generations: A Memoir is one example, as she challenges the notion of a single historical narrative being able to define a people. 

In Clifton’s memoir, we see a repudiation of the profound ontological change inflicted on enslaved people. By clinging to stories of being strong and “the best soldiers in the world,” the women of the Dahomey people could avoid losing their history and having a manufactured one imposed upon them. In rejecting the ontological views of enslavers, they exchange a societally-imposed ontology for a familially imposed one. It is not a surprise then, that stories of these powerful women permeate Lucille’s narrative, as distinctions between the past and present become blurred in the novel and the stories of other Dahomey women become central in defining who Lucille is. While the knowledge of a familial history is integral to Lucille’s formation as an individual, this history does not exist outside the confines of her family, and has been written out of the collective historical record.

In seeking help from a white woman who “compiled and privately printed a history of the Sale/Sayle family of Bedford County Virginia,” Lucille acquiesces to a conventional perspective of history to legitimize her family’s stories. Instead of finding legitimacy, Lucille is devastated to learn that “[o]nly the children of slaves” remember the history of enslaved people; her own family is excluded from the annals of written history. In this manner, Lucille is the sole witness to a history forgotten by society at large, and her family is reduced to “unmarked…graves” in the single American historical narrative, despite having rich and impactful lives. However, knowing her family’s history comes at a cost; Lucille succumbs to the same fallacy as white people — she views history as a guarantee of specific destiny and mistakes knowing facts with the more profound knowledge of understanding. 

When confronted by her father, Samuel, for losing her scholarship and dropping out of school, Lucille justifies her actions by claiming she “was a Dahomey woman.” Historically a group of women who “[g]et what…[they] want,” Lucille knew about her family’s lineage and was able to appropriate the Dahomey women’s power for herself. Lucille’s knowledge of what it means to be a Dahomey woman would be challenged as Samuel accuses her of not knowing “where that [Dahomey] is …[or] even what it means.” At the core of this issue is the battle between knowing and understanding: capable of reciting her grandmother, Ca’line, and other Dahomey women’s stories by heart makes it easy for Lucille to mistake the static recitation of discrete facts for a deeper understanding of what it means to be a Dahomey woman. It is only when her father passes away that she finally understands the essence of being a Dahomey woman, a shared history composed of people “connect[ed] in thin ways that last and last and lives become generations made out of pictures and words just kept.” 

Realizing that her history is not a single narrative, but the collective experiences and stories of all Dahomey people, grants Lucille the ability to acknowledge that subjectivity is inherent in any attempt to define what it means to be Dahomey. Lucille can never reach an objective overarching historical narrative as the Dahomey people’s history is based on the rejection of an imposed ontology and the promulgation of the diverse stories constituting a shared history. This enables the formation of individual ontologies instead of a singular, static ontology to define a society. With her newfound wisdom, Lucille remedies Ca’line’s error in summarizing the Dahomey people as composed of “strong women and weak men” instead of trying to break the pattern. In bearing “sons [that] are as strong as… [her] daughters,” Lucille rights Ca’line’s wrong and reaffirms she truly understands what it means to share a history, that “our lives are more than the days in them, our lives are our line and we go on.” As she pictures Ca’line approving of her realization, Lucille can rest easy knowing that she is part of a larger story, both uniquely hers and profoundly distinct from her.