American International Journal of Humanities and Social Science (AIJHSS)

This article analyzes the fiction work of the African American John Edgar Wideman, Reuben, in which it sees the eponymic protagonist Ruben as crystallizing all the main imagic and essential attributes of the West African deity Legba. This endeavor of black authors to ingrain their quest for the self and the expression of their cultural identity in a vivid awareness of ancestral divinities and myths, and their need to connect to them, bring up the issue of whether collective cultural memory can fade through time, in a historical and social context such as that of African Americans, with deportation, severe repression, and oppression. The major critical approaches used in this research work are Afrocentricity, psychoanalysis, and poststructuralism. It comes up with the conclusion that, despite all these challenges, ancestral culture and religions are well alive and thriving in Black America, thanks to cultural resistance to assimilation and the culture of resistance.