Terminus |
Literary Destinations |
By excluding experiential knowledge and narrative from the arena of legal scholarship, an event?s perspective is skewed in favor of those who operate within the epistemology of traditional law. Williams believes that much truth is lost in this system. In Motherwit (1989), an autobiographical text by Onnie Lee Logan, William's use of narrative employed to provide a source of knowledge that would otherwise not be accounted for. Through this narrative, Logan bears effective witness against an Alabama law that outlawed her profession as a midwife in a failed effort to lower that state's infant mortality rate. She uses the text to refute politician's inaccurate claims against her vocation, not with statistics, but with experience.
What I'm talking about is the death of so many mothers and babies in those times, and the midwife was blamed. That was not the midwife. That was the lackin of prenatal care. No vitamins, no calciums. No prenatal care whatsoever. It was not havin the proper food. . . If the filth was there it was because the bed and the clothes wasn?t quite sanitary. If they get that fever, childbirth fever is mostly a natural thing that will happen to you. The causes I don?t know. If it come from the midwives there wouldn?t be hardly any of these babies . . . (65-66)The above passage is an example of narrative used to communicate a little known experience, and to counter the perceived notions fostered by the state that the midwifery was detrimental to the health and well-being of the new born child and its mother. Traditional legal studies would not validate her accounts, but who would better understand the dynamics of midwifery in Alabama than a woman who practiced the profession. By giving the reader a dose of her "narrative motherwit", Logan acts as a voice for her profession even though government had rendered it obsolete.
Motherwit is also a good example of William's use of narrative to speak
in her own specific voice. This literary tool validates Logan's individual
voice by valuing vernacular as much as highly complex legal jargon, which
allows it to be translated as a significant feminist text. This acceptance
of individualism gives William's narrative technique even more significance
in feminist literature because feminists equate power with voice (Jablon
47). This technique is so supportive of oral tradition that it can
be viewed as the means by which to combat the privileging of the third-person
point of view in the study of Western culture which has effectively led
to the devaluing of African American literature (Jablon 49). Narrative
allows the open-minded reader to observe the importance of the voices that
are not currently represented in within normative society. Therefore,
whether the reader is presented with a text that is filled to capacity
with numerous loosely connected narratives, both public and private, and
is the case with Patricia Williams' text; or with a harmonious narrative
autobiography told in first person black vernacular as is Onnie Lee Logan's
work, it stands that the use of narrative is what rendered the text true
to the both authors, and the larger audience of African American women.
Aisha
Francis|
Theory Crossing |
Engines |
Term Crossing |