As we have discussed briefly in class, travel comes in many forms; boarding passes and road maps are not required to perform the act of travel. Reading the first part of Albert Wendt’s Black Rainbow presented a number of instances in which the use of memory also acted as travel for the narrator. Throughout the text, questions were constantly coming up in my mind to try to figure out who the narrator is as an individual. If my mind was not asking questions, it was otherwise feeling this sense of urgency while the narrator was going through this monopoly of survival. The moments that my mind was able to slow its wheels was when the narrator would recall memories about his family that humanized him more to me.
The first instance of the narrator traveling through memory was soon before his freedom and the Tribunal was asking about his thoughts on children. The questions jogged his memory about his thirteen brothers and sisters, and the narrator travels to the past as he explains, “As I resurrected my relatives, I felt close to them again, even to the ones I’d never liked and had avoided since my childhood” (26). This was the first time since the start of the book that I did not feel the narrator’s cold indifference that I initially felt from his seemingly lack of enthusiasm and his reaction to his wife being gone (though we soon learn it was for her safety).
Another moment that seemed to center the narrator during the hectic chase was when he said his motive is his family. The chase had just begun after he was granted freedom, and he explains that “there is purpose to my life again: the search for my family, while they, the hunters, stalked me” (43). This is in a sense a form of travel as well because the narrator has to take the time to dive into his mind and heart to find the meaning to what he is dealing with. He is also literally traveling for his family as this quest continues because he is solely living on the memory of them being in his life.
The narrator is at a complicated point during the chase where he is sitting at a rugby game, but the stressful situation that has put him there does not stop his mind from wandering to the time his wife loved rugby. It is evident to the reader how fond he is of his wife as he explains such specific details about her by saying, “Ten minutes into a game and she could predict which forward pack was going to dominate and how they were going to do it” (72). He was attaching his situation in that very moment to the memories of his wife, her knowledge on rugby, and how the passion went away upon the birth of their children. Again, the narrator is traveling back through his memory, and with those memories that he shared, he becomes more of an individual with a story rather than the citizen with no history that he is meant to be.
No other moment gives more insight into the heart of the narrator and his life than when he is explaining his love for his wife and children to the housekeeper in the safe house that he was having an affair with. He explained his love for Margaret so concisely yet passionately. The way he described his children alluded to pride and nostalgia. The narrator was traveling back to a time when they were all together and again making him show that there is depth to a person who has no history by law.
Memory and family are facets that seem to keep the narrator grounded while he is on this chase for his life. His ability to travel through memory centers him in even the most stressful of situations to serve as a reminder of why he has to go through this. Black Rainbow therefore presents travel in the literal and figurative form through the actions and words of the narrator.
Memory and family are facets that seem to keep the narrator grounded while he is on this chase for his life. His ability to travel through memory centers him in even the most stressful of situations to serve as a reminder of why he has to go through this. Black Rainbow therefore presents travel in the literal and figurative form through the actions and words of the narrator.
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