cover image Antiquated Journals

Antiquated Journals

Jiton S. Davidson. BlackWords, $21 (0pp) ISBN 978-1-888018-04-2

Dreading her 30th birthday, recently separated from the crack-addicted man who was the love of her life, African American graduate student Zelda hides from real and imagined fears behind a perpetual smokescreen of pot. In a bold stroke, debut author Davidson creates a protagonist who narrates in a shroud of marijuana-fogged prose yet whose sincerely tortured voice distinguishes her from many colder Gen-X contemporaries. Although Zelda's anxieties include the usual lack-of-romance gripes, her fears plunge much deeper: Zelda starts to think that she is being haunted by the ghost of a baby she aborted years ago. Half-mad with sleeplessness, Zelda comes to associate the ""ghost"" with ancestral crimes for which it demands expiation. The journal entries that trace her struggles are interspersed with third-person vignettes about friends and family and the journal entries of her namesake, Aunt Zelda, a fierce revolutionary who feels her ties to Africa so strongly that she sometimes morphs into a panther-like beast to fight her white male oppressors. Although flawed by weak dialogue, hackneyed journal entries and intrusive stream-of-consciousness rambles, Davidson's novel may appeal to those who look to current African American fiction for more than hip banter and McMillan clones. (Jan.) FYI: Davidson won the 1997 Gwendolyn Brooks Award for Literary Achievement.