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Wall, Cheryl A. Worrying the Line: Black Women Writers, Lineage, and Literary Tradition. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2005. xii + 309 pp. Cloth: $49.95. Paper: $19.95.
Cheryl Wall's Worrying the Line is an important study of contemporary women writers that integrates notions of artistry and modality associated with African American vernacular music with the textual strategies of writers seeking to subvert, revise, and extend the American and African American literary traditions. For Wall, black women writers represent the multidimensionality of cultural identity by reconstructing family genealogies through the variety of available oral, visual, and written records of existence.
What Wall describes as the "blues trope" (7) for the book is the idea of "worrying the line," a technique whereby singers in the African American blues tradition, as described by Sherley Anne Williams, make use of "changes in stress and pitch, the addition of exclamatory phrases, changes in word order, repetition of phrases within the line itself, and the wordless blues cries that often punctuate the performance of the songs" to emphasize, clarify, or subvert meaning. Wall extends this trope to the techniques of the writers under discussion to subvert, revise, or extend notions of familial and literary lineage, which gives voice to previously unimagined or unheard race, class, sexual preference, and gender-informed stories. The trope, she acknowledges, is directly related to the "repetition with a difference" (16) that characterizes Henry Louis Gates's discussion...