著者

神野 尚 ジンノ ヒサシ Hisashi JINNO

雑誌

大阪産業大学論集. 人文科学編

巻号頁・発行日

vol.113, pp.59-74, 2004-06-30

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This time I take up Roots (1976), the saga of an American family, in which Alex Haley traced his family to its deepest roots, back to his African ancestors. When he was a boy in Henning, Tennessee, Haley s grandmother used to tell him stories about their family - stories that went back to her grandparents, and their grandparents, down through the generations all the way to a man she called "the African." Still vividly remembering the stories after he grew up and became a writer, Haley, who had carried on the dying wishes of Malcolm X that he wanted to refashion the broken strands between the American Negroes and African culture, began to search for documentation that might authenticate the narrative. It took ten years and a half a million miles of travel across three continents to find it, but finally, in an astonishing feat of genealogical detective work, he discovered not only the name of "the African" - Kunta Kinte - but the precise location of Juffure, the very village in The Gambia, West Africa, from which he was abducted in 1767 at the age of sixteen and taken on the Lord Ligonier to Maryland and sold to a Virginia planter. This paper aims at going deep into the born episodes of Roots together with Haley's life full of vicissitudes.