Walker, Joseph A. | Helen Armstead Johnson
HELEN ARMSTEAD JOHNSON
Joseph A. Walker's Ododo (truth) is an unstructured, loosely hung kind of review, if anything. It is self-contradicting in both form and content. The first four of fourteen scenes are highly stylized symbolic conceptions of an African birth-of-man fable, and of the initial entrapment of Africans by predatory human animals….
Walker has trouble with his assessment of the Black man. To begin with, he uses symbolism which he seems unable to control. In one of the early stages of African life, the Creator … delivers a large bag and a small one to Black mankind, which, quite predictably, chooses the large one filled with garments, the symbols of materialism. The other bag contains immortality. [The Creator] then chastizes Black mankind for having opted for "things rather than essences." Here Walker makes the Black man indistinguishable from the white one. Later, however, in a skit with anthropological overtones, "Black...
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