“troubling the waters”: The Magic of Remembering the Past in Leon Forrest’s Two Wings to Veil My Face

Abstract

Composed during the decades of intense debates over the possibility of retrieving an authentic African American identity, Two Wings to Veil My face is a reaction against the nativists who argued for and celebrated a genuine African American identity. The authors of this article illustrate that Leon Forrest has implemented magical realism to metaphorically unearth the long suppressed voices of the past in order to construct a contemporary identity. However, the ancestral past, as represented by the narrators, is neither unadulterated nor fully innocent. To this aim, the protagonists remember and relate the horrendous communal history, and thus reveal the complicity of some African Americans with the slave-owners. Through remembering the traumatic experiences of the community’s past, as this study will explicate, the hero of the novel, Nathaniel, re-invents his identity based on an uncensored communal history and accentuates the primacy of communal bonds over the illusory family lines.