Word: harlan
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...growth of Harlan's personality to fit the huge shoes of her narrative voice is Jones's great accomplishment in The Healing. The stylistic design optimally supports the narrative's broad theme of constructing a personal identity in a world bent on its destruction. At one point, Jones encapsulates this quest for self by retelling the biography of Grandmother Jaboti, Harlan's ancestral precursor in the art of identity building. Jaboti began her life not as a human but as a turtle-woman in a traveling carnival freak show, kept on display between the bearded lady and the unicorn girl...
Whenever Grandma Jaboti tells this story to Harlan, her mother tempers the narrative by explaining that Grandmother Jaboti wasn't really a turtle, but had simply been put in a fake turtle shell by evil carnival managers that had convinced Jaboti of her turtlehood when she was too young to know the truth. Despite her attempts to provide a rational explanation of Jaboti's surreal biography, though, Harlan's mother cannot help but be nervous about the influence of this story, worrying that such fantasy might render Harlan unable "to tell the truth from the truth...
When we meet the grown Harlan on the Greyhound bus handing out brochures for her faith-healing business and discussing water tanks with as much fervor as a pilgrim at a reliquary, her mother's concern about Harlan's grasp on "reality" begins to seem justified. Starting from the Spirit of Scandinavia Sardines, Harlan's train of thought takes off and plows through an existence where there is no boundary between the real and the unreal, the true and the untrue. From sardines she jumps to the slave-ships of the Middle Passage, to the fake Moroccan leather...
Each leap of interest rendered with a minutiae of detail and consistency of expression that expose just how out of touch Harlan is with established notions of what is "true" and what is "important...
Unsettlingly random in its own right, the blue streak of experience and memory that runs across the pages of this book is made downright disturbing by Harlan's refusal to anchor its happenings in the framework of an established hierarchy of truth and reality. In The Healing, bearded ladies and unicorn girls are endowed with as much credence as the subjects of her husband's anthropological research and Paul Simon's lyrics are as respectable a system for understanding the world as the logic Harlan learns at night school...