Toni Morrison and the African-American experience

In 1993 Toni Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. She was the first African-American female writer to win this coveted prize. In awarding the Nobel Prize to Toni Morrison, the Committee referring to the author said that ‘who in novels characterised by visionary force and poetic import gives life to an essential aspect of American reality.’

Last week she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Obama - the highest award bestowed on a civilian.

Her latest novel ‘Home’ was published recently. All these factors urge as to re-examine Toni Morrison's growing body of work which has succeeded in initiating a vital conversation with American culture.

Crucial role

Toni Morrison, along with such distinguished African-American writers as Richard Wright, James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison have played a crucial role in generating a sophisticated interest in African-American literature. In Toni Morrison’s case, she succeeded in focusing on the experiences of African-American women in a way that was absent in the creative and critical writings of the other writers that I alluded to.

Hence, when we re-examine Morrison's body of work, we need to bear in mind the two important facts-that she was concerned with the predicaments and tribulations of African-Americans as well as the silencing and marginalization of women by society that endorses patriarchal values.

Let us first consider her latest novel Home. It carries forward some of her thematic interests and stylistic preferences displayed in her earlier work, although in terms of achieved art, in my judgment, it does not measure up to her earlier masterpieces such as Beloved and The Song of Solomon. This novel deals with the life and times of Frank Money, an African-American war veteran who is on his way back to Georgia. He is portrayed as a violent and emotional man; he sees himself as an outsider.

He drinks heavily and was devastated by two of his best friends dying in battle. When the narrative commences, we see Frank Money in a mental ward in a hospital. He is bound to a bed. We are made to understand that he is weighing the possibilities of an escape. However, when he actually succeeds in this attempt, he realises to his surprise how easy it was.

Frank Money finds his way to Chicago, and then moves south towards his hometown of Lotus. He sees Lotus as ‘the worst place in the world, worse than any battlefield. At least, on the field there is a goal, excitement, daring and some chance of winning along with many chances of losing….In lotus there was no future, just long stretches of killing time. There was no goal other than breathing, nothing to win and save for somebody else’s quiet death, nothing to survive or worth surviving or worth surviving for.’ Clearly, he has a very pessimistic vision of his hometown.

What is somewhat paradoxical is Lotus s the only location to which he can take his sister Cee. She lives in a suburb of Atlanta and is in the verge of death. He likes her and only person in the world to whom he is attached. This relationship serves to give form and shape to his amorphous life experiences. The architecture of the book depends heavily on Frank Money’s relationship to his sister and what it means to him.

In this narrative the themes of home, family, belonging, identity, alienation, disenchantment that recur frequently in Toni Morrison’s other novels find eloquent expression. As in her other novels, there is a complex narrative pattern in Home. She tells the story from diverse perspectives; she oscillates between brief sections that are seen through the eyes of frank money and elaborate third person narratives associated with Cee’s consciousness as well as their grandmother. Toni Morrison complicates her narrative and thereby energises it by the hostility that frank displays towards the third-person narrator. At one point, Frank says, ‘I don’t think you know much about love…or me.’ The way this novels reflects on itself, setting in motion diverse voices that are in tension, gives it a post-modernist touch as it enacts the problems of literary narration.

Strengths

One of the strengths of the novel, it seems to me, is the way in which it foregrounds the idea of narrative, narrative can be construed as an endeavor to impose a pattern on the flux of events to extract a coherent meaning out of a jumble of events. and the reader becomes an active participant in the narrative and a co-creator of fictional meaning in the way he or she interprets the flow of events so as to construct a shareable world. In this regard Toni Morrison’s Home deserves close study.

I stated earlier that Home is not as successful as Beloved or the Song of the Solomon because the author has not re-created her fictional world in sufficient density to involve us unconditionally and immediately. The narrative moves too rapidly without allowing the opportunity to allow them to make their presence felt, the meaning established, under the guiding hand of the author.

The feeling that this novel engenders in the reader that the author has visited these themes and interests before does not make for compelling reason. At the same time the lyricism, acute observations, the ability to create scenes charged with anguish and wonder that we have come to expect from Morrison are abundantly present.

Evolution

We can better understand this novel of Toni Morrison by situating it within the evolution of her earlier work. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, (1970) deals with the tragic life of eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove, a young black woman. The story is set in Morrison’s hometown of Lorain, Ohio. What Pecola wanted in life was love – for her family and friends to love her.

Apparently, this proved to be an impossible objective. She felt that she was abused at home and humiliated at school because she was ugly and because of her dark skin, she thought that if only she had blue eyes and blonde hair things would have been fine ‘each night, without fail, she prayed for blur eyes.’ Pecola is subject increasingly to this self-torture and gradually she goes insane; she retreats into a world of fantasy in which she is adored because of the fact that she has the bluest of eyes.

In the narrative discourse of this novel, the characters Claudia and Frieda play the role of foils to her. They are able to withstand and overcome the intense pressures that African-American females are subject to. They were aided in this effort by the members of the family; their love was able to sustain Claudia and Frieda and prevent the kind of tragedy that befell Pecola. This novel, with its lyrical language and challenging vision, Toni Morrison put the world on notice that a major talent had arrived in the American literary scene. As the New York Times said of this novel, it is, ‘so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry.’

In an Afterword written to the novel some decades later Toni Morrison made the following observation.’ I focused on how something as grotesque as the demonisation of an entire race could take root inside the most delicate member of society; a child. The most vulnerable member; a female. In trying to dramatise the devastation that even casual racial contempt can cause, I chose a unique situation, not a representative one.’

The second novel that Toni Morrison wrote was Sula (1974). It tells the story of Sula Pease, a wonderfully unconventional woman who ended up being an outcast in her hometown of Medallion, Ohio. At the age of twelve, Sula and her friend Nel Wright realise that they ‘were neither white nor male, and that all freedom and triumph was forbidden to then, they set about creating something else to be.’ Nel comes from a stable home that was rigid in adherence to conventions. Sula lived with her mother and grandmother both of whom were regarded as loose and eccentric .Nel gets married and is destined to a life of convention while Sula’s life unfolds in unique ways. She has many affairs mostly with white men. As she refused to flow codes and conventions, she was branded as someone unusual and unconventional; as this reputation spread she was regarded as evil.

Outcast

Sula became in an outcast in the community, she became evil incarnate. And in a strange way she inspired goodness in others. It was only when she dies that both Nel and the society at large recognize tat she indeed was their life force; that Sula constituted the missing half. Nel felt that without Sula her life was incomplete. Toni Morrison narrates this story with her customary literary virtues.- elegant and moving prose, sharp observations and capacity for empathizing with the downtrodden and unconventional. Her ability present memorable characters is fully in evidence in Sula. This novel depicts very movingly and persuasively the lives of two black women from their close-knit childhood in a small town in Ohio, through their contrastingly different pathways of womanhood to their eventual confrontation and reconciliation.

Her third novel is Song of Solomon (1977). In my judgment, Beloved and Song of Solomon are the two best novels written by Morrison. Here the protagonist is a man and not woman. It traces the process of self-discovery by Macon Dead. Macon was popularly known as ‘Milkman’. He sets out on a number of journeys to recover a lost treasure associated with his family’s past. However, instead of discovering material wealth he ends up discovering something more valuable.

He collected the details about his lineage that he thought he would never know. The journey undertaken by Milkman, in many ways, becomes emblematic of the broader cultural quest of African-Americans. The novel charts with great sensitivity using the power of symbols, the heritage of African-American as it evolves through a mythic African past to slavery to modern society founded upon uncertain values.

Invisibility

Song of Solomon is the reverse of another great novel by an African-American – Invisible Man by Ralph elision. This novel focuses on invisibility while Morrison’s calls attention to visibility. Tony Morrison has displayed her remarkable talent for lyrical fantasy in this novel as indeed in many of her other works. What is interesting about the Song of Solomon is that the deep impulse towards fantasy is kept in check, under tight artistic control.

Harold bloom, the eminent American literary critic believes that something of Virginia Woolf’s aestheticism lingers on in Toni Morrison’s style and vision. Commenting on the interplay of fantasy and realism in this novel, Bloom makes the following astute observation. ’It is remarkable that Morrison is able to sustain her symbolic parable with such a wealth of social realism that the fantastic seems only another version of the everyday.’

The fourth novel by Toni Morrison was titled Tar Baby (1981). Here the setting is the Caribbean island and not a small Midwestern town as in the earlier novels. The story summons a folktale about a farmer who made use of a tar baby to catch a rabbit who proved to be troublesome. The tar baby does not respond to the rabbit’s greetings and he hits the tar baby; as a result he gets stuck. The rabbit pleads with the farmer not to throw him to the briar patch; even skinning him alive is preferable. The farmer throws him into the briar patch.

Model

As the narrative commences, we realise that Jadine who was working as a fashion model in Paris has left France to visit valerian and Margaret Street in the Caribbean. Jadine’s parents died when she was very young and consequently she was separated from her black heritage. It was Valerian Street who raised and educated her. She was a wealthy white candy magnate.

Valerian paid for Jadine’s education in France. She substituted her cultural legacy of status and opulence for Jadine’s black heritage of struggle for survival. In a sense this made Jadine an orphan in more than one sense.

A young black vagrant called son, jumps ship and enters their lives on a Christmas eve. What his presence dies is to foreground dark secrets of violent sexual, racial, familial conflicts that had marred their lives. Before long, Jadine and Son are passionately drawn to each other. However, as a result of the absence of a common racial and cultural past that could sustain them, she is unable to share a life with son. He, however, cannot live without her. She runs away from Son, and he searches for her. Again the nature of African-American racial consciousness and cultural awareness is caught persuasively in the flow of events. The need for a sustaining community is an imperative that Toni Morrison has repeatedly underlined in her writing.

Morrison’s fifth novel is Beloved (1987) and to my mind her finest novel to date. Many critics have described it as a masterpiece. Her prodigious talent, her fierce imagination finds powerful expression in this work of fiction. John Leonard of the Los Angeles times called it a masterwork and that, ‘I can’t imagine American literature without it.’

The novel is based on a true and tragic story. the story is set in rural Ohio, several years after the civil war. The narrative highlights the insidious impact of slavery and its after effects. This a most technically sophisticated novel. Deploying disjointed narratives, flashbacks, multiple points of view, the author examines the unfortunate events that paved the way for Sethe’s hideous crime. Rather than allowing her daughter to grow up in the dark shadows of slavery, she kills her own daughter.

Sethe lives on the outskirts of Cincinnati in a farm house with Denver, her surviving daughter. She is haunted by the overpowering ghost of her baby daughter who was murdered by her. Paul D, a fellow slave, comes to live with them; he is from Kentucky. They believe that he has been able to dispel the spirit that had been haunting seethe. However, one day a b an attractive young woman arrives; she calls herself beloved. It is evident that beloved is the incarnation of Sethe’s murdered daughter. She comes to represent the horror and anguish of more than sixty million who were the victims of the atrocities of slavery. Gradually, she takes control of the household; she describes strength and dynamism from Sethe’s bitter memories. Beloved very nearly killed her mother; however, the community of ex-slave women who up until now had given a cold shoulder to Sethe and Denver since the murder of the bay come together finally to exorcise Beloved. This is how the novel ends. The language, imagery, and tone of these descriptions are characteristic of the entire work ‘This is not a story to pass on.

Stream

Down by the stream her foot prints appear and disappear. They are so familiar. Should a child, an adult place his feet in them, they will fit. Take them out and they disappear again as though nobody ever walked there.

By and by all trace is gone, and what is forgotten is not only the footprint but the water too and what it is down there. The rest is weather. Not the breath of the disremembered and unaccounted for, but the wind in the eaves, or spring ice thawing too quickly. Just weather. Certainly not clamor for a kiss.’

Toni Morrison’s Beloved can be described as a post-modernist novel or a magical realist novel. It is a powerful and haunting narrative that illuminates a very important aspect of the African-American legacy and reality. It is hardly surprising that it was selected as the best American novel written during the last twenty five years. It was made into a very unconvincing film.

After this award-winning novel, Morrison went on to write such other novels as Jazz (1992), Paradise (1998) and A Mercy (2008) and Home (2012). They may not have reached the same heights as Beloved and Song of Solomon; however, they manifest, in their different ways, the indubitable literary skills of the author. Her remarkable ability to capture the insidious powers racial self-loathing is manifest in all her novels.

Reading a novel by Morrison demands an active participation of the reader who must be prepared to be constantly alert and invest what he or she reads with meaning. As she once asserted writing and reading are not all that distinct.

Alert

‘Both exercises require being alert and ready for unaccountable beauty, for the intricateness or simple elegance of the writer’s imagination, for the world that the imagination evokes. Both require being mindful of the places where imagination sabotages itself, locks its own gates, pollutes its vision. Writing and reading mean being aware of the writer’s notions of risk and safety, the serene achievement of, or swat fight for ,meaning and response-ability.’

The notion of imagination is central to the task of the ‘Writers are among the most sensitive, the most intellectually anarchic, most representative, most probing of artists. The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar is the test of their power

The languages they se and the social and historical context in which these languages signify are indirect and direct revelations of that power and its limitations.’ As we read Toni Morrison’s body of fictions critically, it is useful to keep in mind this helpful observation by her.

Toni Morrison’s novels are important for a number of reasons. One such, which is not often discussed, is the subtle communication strategies that are contained in them. For example, in the opening of the novel the bluest eye when she deploys the phrase ‘ quiet as it’s kept’, she employs these as coded words used among black women talking to one another regarding topics that are discussed in the privacy of their intimate circles. She wrote this novel to lay out this private confidence. Morrison establishes an intimacy of communication.

It is evident to the reader that the one who is speaking is doing so from a position of trust. This assumption of shared space between the speaker and the writer points to an important facet of Toni Morrison’s mode of literary communication.

So far I have discussed Toni Morrison’s novels including her latest work Home. Many of these novels are familiar to Sri Lankan readers. What I want to do now is to focus on a critical-interpretive work by her that is titled Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. This is a book that many Sri Lankan readers are unaware of. This monograph of ninety pages is based on the William E. Massey lectures.

It opens up a path of thinking that is vital to a proper understanding of the African-American reality as well as the lager American reality. The monograph consists of three chapters titled Black Matters, Romancing the Shadow and Disturbing Nurses and the Kindness of Sharks.

As many literary commentators have accurately observed this is indeed a stylish and vastly persuasive work of literary exegesis that promises to bring about a transformation in the way in which we read American literature and the wider American society and culture that nurtures it.

Hemingway

In Playing in the Dark, Morrison explores Africanist presence in the writings Edgar Allen Poe, Herman Melville, Willa Cather and Ernest Hemingway with a view to re-imagining the nature of the American literary tradition. In this book, Toni Morrison cogently argues that the themes of freedom, individualism, innocence, experience, manhood, relied upon the presence of a black population that was decidedly unfree.

What the black people did was to act as mirrors to the own fears, anxieties, phobias, and desires of the white authors. Toni Morrison says that regardless of the race of the author, the readers of virtually all of American fiction have been positioned as white. At the beginning of the book she raises a number of questions that serious students of literature should ardently follow.

Imagination

‘I am interested to know what that assumption has meant to the literary imagination. When does racial unconsciousness or awareness of race enrich interpretive language, and when does it impoverish it? What does positing one’s writerly self, in the wholly racialised society that is the United States, as unraced and all others as raced entail?

What happens to the writerly imagination of a black author who is at some level always conscious of representing one’s own race to, or in spite of, a race of readers that understands itself to be universal or race-free in other words, how is literary whiteness and literary blackness made, and what is the consequence of that construction?

How do embedded assumptions of racial (not racist) language work in the literary enterprise that hopes and sometimes claims to be humanistic. When, in a race-conscious culture, is that lofty goal actual approximated? Why not and why? These are questions that invite sustained examination.

The ruminations contained in this monograph grow out of Toni Morrison’s own personal dilemmas as an African-American writer in a white society. She asks herself the question, how free can an African-American writer be in a genderized, sexualized, wholly racialised society. As she explores her own personal situation she is drawn towards the question, what happens to other writers who work in highly racialised societies?

She says that for them, as for her, imagining is not merely looking or looking at; nor is it taking oneself intact into the other. It is becoming. In other words, this study of whiteness and literary imagination in America is integrally connected to her own personal predicament; that is what makes this monograph so compelling.

The black presence in the American literary imagination is the topic that Morrison pursues in this book. She is convinced that the contemplation of this black presence is crucial to a proper understanding of American literature and should not be allowed to hover at the edges of the literary imagination. As she remarks, ‘one can see that a real or fabricated Africanist presence was crucial to their sense of Americanness. And it shows.’ by examining the fiction of such well-known authors as Poe, Melville, Cather and Hemingway, Morrision exemplifies this fact.

For example, in discussing Hemingway’s novel to have and have not, Morrison points out how the serviceability of the Africanist presence becomes even more telling when Hemingway starts to characterise male and female relationships. He sees Africanism being used as a fundamental fictional technique through which to project character.

Characters

She says that in this novel, the characters Harry and Marie solicit our admiration by the comparison that is enforced between their claims to fully embody humanity and a discredited Africanism. As Morrison asserts, ‘Africanism becomes not only a means of displaying authority, but, in fact, constitutes its source.’ these readings of Poe, Melville Cather and Hemingway have a deeper implication that transcends literary matters. She raises important questions about the very being of American society. She believes that studies of American Africanism should be explorations into the ways in which a non-white Africanist presence and personae have been constructed-invented – in America and the if the literary ends this constructed presence has served

Playing in the Dark is not a book full of anger or hatred; it is a balanced study of a very important topic. As a matter of fact Toni Morrison’s critiques grow out of a deep love of literature and not from an animus against it. The concluding paragraph of the book captures this well. ‘Ernest Hemingway who wrote so compellingly about what it was to be a white male American; however, he could not help folding into his enterprise of American fiction, its Africanist properties.

It would be a pity if the criticism of that literature continued to shellac those texts, immobilising their complexities and power and laminations just below its tight, reflecting surface. All of us, readers and writers, are bereft when criticism remains too polite or too fearful to notice a disrupting darkness before its eyes.’

The importance of Toni Morrison’s monograph, Playing in the Dark, is perceptively underlined by Edward Said when he says that Morrison’s book is moved not by anger but by delight as well as from what she has learned about the ways in which writers transform facets of their social grounding into facets of language.

As Said says, ‘what she discusses are instances of the master narrative, works by Poe, Mark Twain, Hemingway, Cather whose significance on aesthetic and historical grounds is granted in a manner that is neither hectoring nor vengeful.’ This remark of Edward Said speaks to the true strength of Toni Morrison’s monograph; indeed, this is a monograph that should be widely read in Sri Lanka for its cultural insights as well as elegance of phrasing. Her writings, in general, have the effect of promoting a cultural self-enlargement of her readers.