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Leon Forrest. Divine Days. Chicago: Another Chicago P, 1992. 1,138 pp. $32.50. Michelle Cliff. Free Enterprise. New York: Dutton, 1993. 223 pp. $19.00.
In every sentence of their novels Divine Days and Free Enterprise Leon Forrest, native Chicagoan of Creole, Africa, and American ancestry, and Michelle Cliff, born and raised in Jamaica, embody the effects of their mixed cultural heritage. Both authors descend from a catastrophic history that reverberates with contradictions, and in response to this background, Forrest and Cliff create protagonists who are orphans in search of surrogate parental figures. Their characters excavate history, prospecting for their own stories -- materials with which to transform and reinvent their identities. This is an act Forrest has described, in relation to African Americans, as a process "of taking something that is available or, maybe conversely, denied to blacks and making it into something else for survival and then adding a kind of stamp and style and elegance."
Forrest's most recent novel, Divine Days, is set in Forest County, a reinvented Chicago which also serves as the setting for his previous three novels. The protagonist and narrator, Joubert Antoine Jones, is a literal orphan in search of a spiritual father, and more than a thousand pages comprise the narrative of his week. Divine Days resembles Joyce's Ulysses not just in terms of size and scope, but in its rich variety of language/voice and ways of storytelling. And Joubert, like Joyce's Stephen Dedalus, needs to find a spiritual father in order to develop a sense of identity. Joubert, "hypersensitively attuned to the sound of voices, babblings, other-wordly and worldly tongues," is a playwright, reporter, and self-appointed detective, historian, and curator of stories. He is ostensibly collecting materials for what is to be his chef d'oeuvre, Divine Days, but what unfolds is an awesome encyclopedia of the African American consciousness.
This consciousness is expressed through the multifarious faces, adventures, and hardships of a metropolis of characters -- preachers, police, ex-boxers, steelworkers, dancers, Creoles, intellectuals, prostitutes, hustlers, and a one-time Shakespeare professor. Joubert ("Jew-bear") has a name which lends itself to many affectionate and not-so-affectionate appellations: Brudder-Bear, Sugar-Bear, Baby-Bear, Brer-Bear, Bear-Meat. He may be an orphan, but he is strongly linked to and clamorously claimed by Forest County. He has...