| Summary: | In her epic trilogy Father Comes Home from the Wars Suzan-Lori Parks explores the (re)construction of social relations between and within communities during the American Civil War. To do so, Parks builds normative expectations, which she later deconstructs by means of ambivalence. Parks defies archetypal understandings of black slavery and questions the rigidity of our historical memories of war. Hence, the initial power imbalance of the trilogy reveals unethical and hostile dynamics of war. In view of the outcomes of racism, classism and sexism, Parks’s protagonists react ambivalently, disrupting expectable alliances. Their radical dissociation produces otherness and alienation within the boundaries of the black community, which are overcome returning to one’s own roots. In constructing a liminal battlefield, Parks challenges preconceived ideas of freedom while dissecting the evolution of her black characters’ identities during the conflict, thereby reshaping the slave narrative tradition to make it fit into the highly ambivalent context of war. This frame of reference reduces humans to mere commodities, allocating the process to recover self-determination in the fight against one’s own cause, community and beliefs.
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