Finding Fish

Just as Antwone doesn’t know the names for the kinds of blue he sees in his childhood dream, he experiences childhood abuse as a lack of language. Trauma may be defined as an experience that the subject finds impossible to integrate. Social disadvantage is thus linguistic in the sense that the experient is unable to translate traumatic experience, and thus social disadvantage further inhibits self-expression and propounds voicelessness.

Antwone consistently encounters foreign languages in Act 1. The same dream ends with the kind woman Antwone meets “speaking words I don’t recognize but that sound familiar” (63). Only later can he translate her words: “Be mindful, chile, and look out fo’ yo’se’f. Don’t worry none, you’re not alone” (64). Antwone finds Mrs. Pickett inscrutable, and she speaks in tongues. In his search for a sense of identity, he lights on his surname, a symbol of his family. This linguistic connection offers him a sense of identity and agency in the world. The link between language, identity, and personal agency is evident from the punning title of the memoir: Finding Fish. Antwone must find himself, voyaging both literally and spiritually and enduring periods of being “at sea,” before he rediscovers himself. Some of this self-discovery takes place, unsurprisingly, in a psychologist’s practice. Again, Antwone’s connection with Dr. Fisher is linguistic: “the sameness of our names made me come to think of this man as some sort of ally” (99).

When the young Antwone is unable to understand or bear his experiences, he creates a story to explain them. Imagination serves as a kind of savior in hard times: “It was two Jewish high school students from Glenville High who invented Superman” (77). The power of imagination to save Antoine from life’s difficulties is threatened as his understanding of reality develops. In the hands of Mrs. Pickett, the power of storytelling is shown to be morally ambivalent: “I came to recognize that she wasn’t a bad storyteller” (80). The inmates at the federal prison are also “great storytellers” (328). Deception is as possible an outcome as salvation when it comes to storytelling. Yet Mrs. Pickett’s lie about Antwone’s father being a thief comes to light in the moment in which Antwone rebukes her publicly for framing him as such.

Antwone distinguishes between the unwanted “ghost stories” (121) preached in church from his own critically important life story:

Before that meeting with Commander Williams, I had never told anyone my story. I had never been given the chance to connect the dots of my existence, to see the shape and the course of my life, to observe for myself how everything that had happened had its reason, its lesson (306).

Antwone connects his life story with the wider context of American history. Antwone undertakes the rescribing of this history through his own autobiography. African American identity is not constituted by their enslavement but in a heritage that stretches back far further. Like Antwone, this rich heritage has become orphaned through the difficult circumstances of racism and enslavement:

In telling him the story about who I was, I had accepted that my life began as a foster child. It was along the lines of how black American history is often told, that when we show up in the story we are slaves. To get me to understand that I had a history before my life as a foster child, Commander Williams put it to me in the most basic way possible: “Have you ever considered that you come from somewhere?” (309).

Finally, it is the reinstatement of Antwone’s family story (of his father’s life and death and his mother’s circumstances) that completes both Antwone’s journey back to himself, and the autobiography.

Antwone’s first memory of gazing dreamily out of the window and his recurring childhood dream prefigured Antwone’s ultimate reunion with his family. The narrative of the Post-Memoir negotiates the relationship between dreams and reality that has been a dominant theme all Antwone’s life: “I clung to that preposterous vision and with the force of those dreams willed it and made it happen” (356). His symbolic interpretation of his current life is facilitated by his encounter with the reality of the imagined figures who eluded him in childhood: his mother, father, and wider family.

The progression from relating to others as imagined and idealized objects to perceiving them realistically as ambivalent and autonomous is one of the major goals of psychoanalysis. The project of the autobiography is in many ways a psychoanalytic one. Besides the obvious association with dream interpretation and analysis, the articulation of the subject’s life story is intrinsic to psychoanalytic treatment, which aims at restoring the integrity of the traumatized analysand. Jacques Lacan wrote that in identifying with the “Name of the Father,” the subject can enter the Symbolic order of society and language. Antwone follows precisely this path. Lacan wrote in his Rome Report that “[s]ymbols in fact envelop the life of man in a network so total that they join together [...] the shape of his destiny.”