African Diasporic Short Fiction | Darlene Roy (essay date summer 1988)
Darlene Roy (essay date summer 1988)
SOURCE: Roy, Darlene. “Henry Dumas—Master Storyteller.” Black American Literature Forum 22, no. 2 (summer 1988): 343-45.
[In the following essay, Roy offers a brief evaluation of the black experience as reflected in Henry Dumas's Ark of Bones and Other Stories.]
Reading Ark of Bones and Other Stories by Henry Dumas makes me feel recurrently grateful at being allowed a private peek into his personal perception of the Black Experience. His rich application of imagery and symbolism is reflected in such universal conflicts as male/female, good/evil, progress/stagnation, racial separation/racial harmony, and labor/education; or is developed through his use of our time-honored beliefs, customs, and traditions, such as the rites of passage; or is grounded in our fascination with the wonders of nature like rivers, trees, etc. Dumas uses this variegated spool of symbolic and mythological threads to...
[The entire page is 938 words long]
Navigate
