존 에드거 와이드만의 『두 도시』에 나타난 사랑과 인종주의 폭력에 대한 저항의 문제

Abstract

The purpose of this essay is to explore John Edgar Wideman's Two Cities (1998) which manipulates the African American historical legacy of Emmett Till, murdered by white racists in the 1950s in Two Cities (1998). in order to reveal the current issues of continuously victimizing African Americans in two particular places, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. By landscaping the cruel reality of African Americans' lives in two cities, a microcosm of American society through the lens of the historical legacy, Wideman urges us to see that African American subjects have still suffered from the fear of victimization by racial violence in American society. Their positions as victims have not been changed and even more vulnerable to the physical and mental threats of racial violence. Wideman, however, suggests that the murder of Emmett Till and its legacy will be a methodological way of how African American can resist being victimized by such racial violence. What Wideman argues in the work is that African Americans need to establish the well-organized community-based resistance which entirely involves every African American individual in the mental solidarity by love. His Two Cities well presents such issues in the unique narrative formation of love story among Martin Marllory, Cassina, and Robert. Marllory, traumatized by witnessing the murder of his comrade Gus by white soldiers for having sexual intercourse with two local white women, loses his linguistic ability to express himself, cannot adjust himself to the society and wanders around American like a vagabond. He, however, finds a way to overcome his burden of moral responsibility for the death of Gus in the act of photographing the cruel reality of African Americans' lives. Ironically, while photographing them as evidence for racial violence in two cities, he suddenly dies in the midst of the text and leaves all his projects unfinished, the projects he designs to reveal the truth of African American lives through photographs. This seems to be writer's strategic purpose to integrate the subject of love into establishing community-based resistance. Though Cassima inherits all photographs from Marllory with his will to burn all of them immediately, she fails to complete his will because of her deep love to him. His photographs are the only remains which connect her to memory of her lover. Instead of burning them, she opens up his photographs to the public in his funeral. Though it happens by mistakes, her act turns out to be significant in that she partially accomplishes Marllory's purpose of photographs, and his purpose is to produce another great community-based movement against racial violence as the photograph of Emmett Till in the funeral encourages African American community in the 1950s to rise up against the impersonal injustice and racial violence.