Jean Toomer, Sojourner: Striking Experience in the South and Southwest

Abstract

Early in his unfinished or fragmentary 1935 play, A Drama of the Southwest, Jean Toomer’s Interpreter declares, “They will come southwestward, not on horseback or in a covered wagon but driving a motor-car. Even so they will strike experience here, as man ever does when his heart is freshly given to a place.” Thus, he alerts the audience to the play’s interest in tourists and neonatives and provides a rationale for the work’s creation, a defense of Toomer’s own creative position as an intensely involved sojourner whose relationship to the Southwest was a complicated interpolation between love and hate, belonging and repulsion. The position is one that Toomer has occupied before, vis-à-vis Sparta, Georgia. The reception and criticism of Toomer’s work has long been plagued by an over-eagerness (exemplified most recently by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Rudolph Byrd) to treat the Georgia work as authentic and all post-Cane work as ruined by Toomer’s passing. This misuse of biography has been central to dismissals of A Drama of the Southwest. When considered at all, the play is painted as a simple autobiography or a piece of Gurdjieffian propaganda, but these characterizations fail to account for the play’s remarkable range of interests and achievements. A fair and archivally responsible examination of A Drama of the Southwest reveals that Toomer’s much praised and prematurely mourned lyricism is in evidence, as well as his remarkable ability to imagine and empathize with an unfamiliar community and explore many of the tensions–including race and gender relations–at its heart.