Colonization : Tar Baby

 Colonization : Tar Baby 

Dr Manisha Patil 

Isle des Chevaliers replicates the colonial class structure. Valerian Street, like Robinson Crusoe and Prospero, has established a profitable civilization on a remote secluded island in the Caribbean. Here he presides over his plantation household like a king ruling over his beautiful wife Margaret, his obedient servants Sydney and Ondine, their occasional helpmates Gideon (Yardman) and Therese (Mary) and Sydney’s visiting niece Jadine. Though Tar Baby is not a tale about brutalities of slavery like Beloved and Valerian is not cruel slave master like the Schoolteacher, he, none-the-less governs the lives of everybody else. He is a typical, representative neo-colonial white American male with an attitude, a masked will, to buy the whole world in the name of philanthropic and patronizing aid. He displays philanthropy not for any genuine altruistic reason but to give free reign to his desire to exercise absolute power by manipulating people. 

Valerian truly symbolizes the white capitalism – accumulation of wealth through destruction of nature and exploitation of non-white laborers. He has collected his unlimited wealth through candy business. The base of this business is in the fertile Caribbean soil and the long history of plantation slavery, where both land and people were mercilessly exploited to produce the cash crops like sugar and cocoa (also the main ingredients of candy) by the white colonizers to realize their ‘American Dream.’ Valerian has reached the zenith of wealth and power in the American capitalist system. ‘Like the Puritan ideal of years past, he has erected his house on the hill, and he has done so by having other pull on his bootstraps. “Laborers from Haiti were hired to clear Isle des Chevaliers of its rain forest, ‘already two thousand years old,’ destroying animals, flowers and a river. Civilization marched onto the island in the guise of rich businessmen needing a tropical retreat from long northern winters” (Coser 107). Valerian is the example of rich businessmen searching for a hiatus from northern winters.

Valerian’s employees (slaves) have more than put the shoe horn in his boot, so the task is easier, though. They have found the material to make his boots. They have stitched the material to make the boots, and they have put his foul feet in the boots. Valerian in turn has walked on the people who have made him what he is, kicking them while they are vulnerable, dirtying their work and squashing them out.’2

Morrison further criticizes Valerian as the prototypical American capitalist by condemning his lavish but destructive lifestyle. ‘He reeks with the odor of capitalism and its foul aftertaste. He has created a home that has desecrated the natural world, much in the same way as those colonists of years past did, believing it was their destiny from God. He, like they, has trampled the ground and slashed the trees in order to construct a house that will remind him of his childhood. He has called upon the labor of others to erect his plantation-like home, complete with servant quarters and servants.’3 Valerian enacts the role of kindly master with Sydney and Ondine, believing that they are eccentric and so always in need of his care. He assures Margaret, “I have always taken care of them.” (31) However, he is completely oblivious of the fact that actually it is Sydney and Ondine who have always taken care of him. He on the other hand, has followed a rigid adherence to convention and strictly avoided any healthy human interaction with them. When Margaret and Ondine begin to develop a friendship, Valerian imposes the values of plantation myth: “Valerian put a stop to it saying she should guide the servants, not consort with them” (59). ‘Morrison extends this motif in a specifically postmodern fashion when she describes the relationship between Valerian’s social and literary attitudes: “He read only mail these days, having given up books because the language in them had changed so much – strained with rivulets of disorder and meaninglessness” (14). For Valerian, anything that challenged his comfortable myths was ‘meaninglessness’. He does not hesitate to enforce this illusion through the economic power always present but rarely acknowledged in the plantation myth. When Gideon and Therese violate his rules, he fires them. When he responds to Sydney’s question “Everything all right, Mr. Street?” by saying “I am going to kill you, Sydney” (33), he unintentionally reveals the historical reality behind the plantation myth.’4 

According to Philip Page, the house that Valerian has constructed ‘is the symbol of Valerian’s hegemony over nature, blacks, and females, and its ill effects suggest the damage inflicted by that system.’5 

The first and foremost person to be irreparably damaged is Magaret. Sean Campbell writes, ‘Within the Street home Margaret is one of many subordinate figures to Valerian. Margaret is a shadow of a person. She is not a strong, independent woman. Instead, she is an extremely dependent woman who relies upon her physical beauty to accomplish anything. She married young and she married into money. Her ascent upward within the capitalistic social ranks can be seen in Morrison’s description of her traversing stairs. “She was on the two concrete steps of the trailer; the six wooden steps of the hand-built house; the thirty-seven steps at the stadium when she was crowned; and a million wide steps in the house of Valerian Street” (57). Margaret’s beauty allowed her to stand at the top of the stadium and her beauty also allowed her “to fall in love with and marry a man who had a house bigger than her elementary school” (57). For Margaret, her marriage to Valerian is luck colored in gold, and she is a young, beautiful, ignorant woman whom Valerian can parade around and control.’6 She can be compared to Miranda in The Tempest. Like Miranda, she is deformed by her relationship to a domineering father-husband who molds her in such a way that forever she remains infantile, doubting everything she does and even at the age of fifty, terribly afraid of a young and handsome black man (as young as her son, Michael), Son – the Caliban/Ferdinand figure who has swum to the Island – whom she fantasizes as a black raper. Because Valerian kept her stupid and idle, she had a grudge against her husband but as she could not hurt him, she hurt their baby son Michael. She struck pins in his behind, burned him with cigarettes. This is an example of how in an unjust system, the oppressed internalize the oppression and then perpetuate it.

Another example of internalization of hegemony on the part of oppressed is Sydney and Ondine. They are the Ariel figures who serve Valerian/Prospero faithfully for more than thirty years but still dream of freedom and retirement. They are honest, obedient, kind and dignified. On one hand, they know the evils of hierarchal system in which they live (Margaret’s abuse of Michael and their total dependence on Valerian) but on the other hand, they too have developed a sense of superiority to those who are still lower in the capitalist hierarchy. As the house slaves, they look down upon the field slaves, calling them “Yardman” and “Mary” like Valerian and not knowing their real names Gideon and Therese. In this way they relate themselves with their master’s racist ways rather than identifying with their own people. They have also internalized the inherent desire for separation characteristic of a capitalistic culture that separates individuals by class – a desire to feel superior to at least one other person. Sydney displays this internalized capitalistic superiority complex while speaking to Son: “I know you, but you don’t know me. I am a Philadelphia Negro mentioned in the book of the very same name. My people owned drug stores and taught school while yours were still cutting their faces open so as to be able to tell one of you from the other.” (163) However, despite Sydney’s claims to superiority he and Ondine ‘are just one step away from being in the same poverty stricken position as Gideon and Therese. Although they live in the house and identify with their oppressors, they are far from on the same level. Sydney and Ondine live a second-hand life, exemplified by their living quarters: “The difference between this room and the rest of the house was marked. Here were second hand furniture, table scarves, tiny pillows, scatter rugs and the smell of humans” (160). Fearful of losing the comfort afforded to them in their second-hand life, they accept the humiliation of being adults treated as children, as their surname implies (Mbalia 71).’7

Gideon and Therese are the subalterns at the lowest rung of capitalist ladder and nearest to earth and African culture. They are the ones who do hard manual labor for Valerian and his household but, except for Son, nobody in the Street household even feel it important to know their real names. As “Yardman” and “Mary”, their identity and individuality are erased. Gideon has first-hand experience of the double standards and hypocrisy of American capitalism and its ideal ‘American Dream’ – which gives the false hope to poor people that they can become rich through hard work. After slogging for long twenty years in America, he is still as poor as he was before. Disappointed when he came back to his homeland in the Caribbean, he had nothing more than a leisure suit, twelve apples, two dollars and the bitter opinion that “the U. S. is a bad place to die in” (154). His experience has developed in him an anti-capitalistic and pro-community attitude. His shame for the failure in capitalism has given way to a feeling of containment that “being able to die in those coffee-growing hills rather than in those lonely Stateside places gave him so much happiness” (110). Therese who has never been to America and therefore is not subjected to the lie of ‘American (capitalistic) Dream’, constructs an alternative version of America – obviously exaggerated but still truthful – “Therese said America was where doctors took the stomachs, eyes, umbilical cords, the backs and necks where hair grew, blood, sperm, hearts and fingers of the poor and froze them in plastic packages to be sold later to the rich” (151). Morrison uses Therese to bluntly attack the atrocities of white capitalists. The disparity between rich and poor in a capitalist society is not only hard to bridge but the frenzied yearning for money of the white men has polluted African culture, raped African race and damaged African community beyond repair. Therese who has the magic breasts and who is the descendent of the blind race, represents Sycorax, the pre-colonial native woman who has preserved ‘her ancient properties’. 

By contrast, Jadine may be called the ‘mimic’ person. ‘Jadine does not live with her aunt and uncle; instead she lives upstairs, on a higher rung of the social ladder. Valerian has paid for her to study in the best schools and in so doing he has wrapped the materialistic blanket, stitched by capitalism, around her. Jadine returns from school with an education in art history; however, her degree has left her ignorant of her own culture and assimilated into Valerian’s. ‘“Picasso is better than an Itumba mask. The fact that he was intrigued by them is proof of his genius, not the mask-maker’s’” (74). Jadine’s lack of appreciation towards African culture is reflected in this statement, as is the indirect control Valerian holds over her. Like the classic slave master, he has instilled an ideology within Jadine that has caused her to reject her own past, her own African culture.’8 She knows herself to be inauthentic and hollow when she sees the woman in yellow with the tar colored skin – that woman’s woman, that mother/sister/she; that unphotographic beauty (46). The woman recognizes Jadine’s inauthenticity and spits at her in spite. As Karin Luisa Badt says, “Jadine has so willingly embraced white culture that she has become literally its cover model.”9 Jadine is symbolic of a position within the African community, a position that Mbalia calls ‘the African petty bourgeois’. (71)10

In sheer contrast to Jadine, Son takes up the position of staunch defender of African American people and culture. Sean Cmpbell rightly points out,

If Jadine is seen as part of the African petty bourgeois, then Son is part of the subject class. He identifies with the African masses as opposed to Jadine, who rejects them. Also, if Jadine is a symbol of capitalism and materialism, Son is a symbol of community and naturalism. He is extremely critical of capitalism and its effects upon Africans, exemplified by his thoughts at the Christmas dinner. Son sits and watches Valerian chew ham and is outraged at Valerian’s ease with being able to dismiss Gideon and Therese with a “flutter of his fingers,” oblivious to the knowledge that they (Africans) were the ones who had allowed him to grow old in gluttonous comfort.

Son criticizes the manner that Valerian (white capitalists) has accumulated his wealth, through a business whose invention he calls “child’s play.” Valerian has profited off of the backs of Africans and he continues to do so, contracting Caribbean natives to construct his plantation palace in the middle of the rainforest and paying his laborers wages “that would outrage Satan himself.” Son says Valerian knows Gideon and Therese are thieves because “nobody knew thieves and thievery better than he did and he probably thought he was a law-abiding man, they all did, and they always did because they had not the dignity of wild animals who did not eat where they defecated but they could defecate over a whole people” (203). Son realizes how white Europeans have defecated on, discarded, and destroyed people and peoples in order to get what they want: money and power.11 

Thus, in Son Morrison has created a character in opposition to Valerian, and capitalism as Caliban is to Prospero and colonization. Son is neither impressed nor obliged by the philanthropy of Valerian to make Son his honored guest for Christmas in absence of his son Michael. Through his criticism of Valerian, Son expresses the truly ‘Caliban paradigm’: the project of learning how to curse in the master’s language, first articulated by Caliban, the rebellious native of Prospero’s (?) island in Shakespeare’s The Tempest: “You taught me language, and my profit on’t/ Is, I know how to curse” (The Tempest I. Ii. 363-4). As Mbalia rightly comments, ‘He sees himself as a member of the exploited class although he himself is not directly exploited. He understands that if African people in general are exploited then he too is exploited, that if African people are not free, then he is not free.’12

Dr Manisha Patil 

Alternative History, Reality and Perception

 Alternative History, Reality and Perception

Dr Manisha Patil 

Like her earlier novel Sula, Song of Solomon also problematizes the binary thinking. Decentring the white patriarchal logos (which is considered to be the ‘universal’), Morrison provides us with alternative ways to look at history and reality. Commenting on the hegemony of the ‘universal’ criterion of great literature Morrison says,

“I never asked Tolstoy to write for me, a little colored girl in Lorain, Ohio. I never asked Joyce not to mention Catholicism or the world of Dublin. Never and I don’t know why I should be asked to explain your life to you. We have splendid writers to do that, but I am not one of them. It is that business of being universal, a word hopelessly stripped of meaning for me. Faulkner wrote what I suppose could be called regional literature and had it published all over the world. It is good – and universal – because it is specifically about a particular world. That’s what I wish to do.”23 

She further justifies her use of African American myth in her fiction as both specific and ‘universal’.

“Let me give you an example: The flying myth in Song of Solomon. If it means Icarus to some headers, fine; I want to take credit for that. But my meaning is specific: it is about black people who could fly. That was always part of the folklore of my life; flying was one of our gifts. I don’t care how silly it may seen. It is everywhere – people used to talk about it, it’s in the spirituals and gospels. Perhaps it was wishful thinking – escape, death and all that. But suppose it wasn’t, what might it mean? I tried to find out in Song of Solomon.”24

Thus in her writing, Morrison uses a distinctly Afro-centric literary approach ‘to reclaim the collective past of African Americans in order to allow the definition and maintenance of a personal and cultural identity.’25

Throughout Part I, Guitar seems to be the advocate of Afro-centric world view. If Euro-Americans (Whites) consider ‘blackness’ to ‘connect absence, negation and evil’26, Guitar and Seven Days consider whites as lunatic murderers. ‘[W]hen some particularly nasty murder was reported, the Negroes said it was Winnie Ruth…It was their way of explaining what they believed was white madness – crimes planned and executed in a truly lunatic manner against total strangers.’ (100) Crimes committed by blacks are ‘legitimate’ because they are committed in the heat of passion: anger, jealousy, loss of face etc. and to average violation of one’s personal rights – adultery with one’s wife, inhospitality or verbal insults impugning one’s virility, honesty, humanity and mental health. Whites, on the other hand, cold bloodedly lynch, rape and murder blacks without any personal grudge. The only driving factor behind white crime against blacks is ‘racism’ which in turn is the result of white’s unlimited greed for money and power. Guitar gives this whole issue a wider perspective when he says, “Hitter’s the most natural white man in the world. He killed Jews and Gypsies because he didn’t have us.” (155) Hitler propagated the ideology of pure Aryan (Nordic) blood to otherize all other people as ‘inferior’ and so suitable only as slaves to pure Aryans who, he claimed, were destined to rule the world. In the same fashion, whites in America have propagated the ideology of racial purity and white superiority to perpetuate the slavery in disguised form. Guitar says, “There are places right now where a Negro still can’t testify against a white man where the judge, the Jury, the court are legally bound to ignore anything a Negro has to say. What that means is that a black man is a victim of a crime only when a white man says he is.” (160) This institutionalized racism is linked with America’s economic policies. White American males want to control all the natural and human resources all over the world. This desire is the cause of unwanted violence and deaths since the days of Middle Passage till the recent Iraq War. As a result, when Guitar says, “They killed us first and then tried to get some scientific proof about why we should die.” (157), his statement can be used to shed a new light on the whole history of America and world. This ‘marginalized’ perspective challenges the ‘universal’ American perspective of unbounded glory – unlimited freedom and success – and in turn itself becomes the ‘universal’ perspective to criticize America’s narrow white logocentrism.

In contrast to America’s white logos, Morrison provides us with black logos. Starting with the title itself, ‘It sets up an ironic allusion to the Hebrew Bible only in older to displace that intertext in favour of a textually sanctioned reference to black oral tradition and the blues. This displacement of one of the grounding texts of the western literary and cultural canon has lead many critics to read the novel as the reclamation of an autonomous black or African-centred tradition, a tradition that in the novel passes primarily through a woman, Pilate.’27 If the white logos emphasizes the written historic records, the black logos foregrounds oral history which over the generations is mythologized in a song. This oral history is not dead (like the written history and for that matter any written record like that of the freedmen’s beauro which gave the bizarre surname ‘Dead’ to Milkman’s family) but it comes alive with its every repetition. During its oral recitations, it is also personalized. In the similar fashion, white logos looks ahead at the future, creating the illusion of continuous progress. Rothberg compares Milkman with Walter Benjamin’s well-known ‘angel of history’ whose ‘face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurts it in front of his feet.’ The angel is caught in a ‘Storm’ that ‘irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him goes skyward. This storm is what we call progress.’28 Black logos, on the other hand, looks back at the past, at the unbroken genealogy and tradition, despite the ruptures of slavery. With his journey south, Milkman recovers his past, he gathers the fragments of his family’s history scattered all over the place and with his newly gained insight, properly arranges them to reveal a wholely black text. With this revelation, ‘Milkman has escaped the linguistic prison into which the drunker Yankee soldier wantonly threw his grandfather and all subsequent generations of his family. He has recovered that “name that was real” and with it an identity based on blackness as an affirmation…’29 

Milkman’s new identity is different from the classical American identity formation of the hero (depicted in the books of white male authors and imitated in those of black male authors) which is formed against female and feminity and by going away from family on a solitary journey like a cowboy. However, ‘[F]ocusing on fathers and sons, the novel offers a different evaluation of the individualist self-reliant model of male heroism celebrated in American Society. Relying on a number of women, Milkman does not achieve self-hood on his own – he is coached by Pilate, loved by Ruth and Hagar, cared for by his sisters, guided by Circe and healed by sweet. This realization of indebtedness enables Milkman to fly in a libratory mode.’30 

The novel depicts three flights – Solomon’s, Smith’s and Milkman’s. Solomon’s flight is a mythical one which means both going back to his (Solomon’s) roots (i.e. Africa) and deserting his wife and children. Smith, as a member of Seven Days does not have a wife, but his ‘love’ (a love too great to bear) for African American race makes his flight a tragic gesture and a warning. Yet, it is Milkman’s flight which draws the main attention and discussion. Milkman’s flight imitates that of Solomon but with an essential difference – in his final flight Milkman does not leave anybody behind to grieve because Hagar is already dead. He has also acknowledged the value of her ‘self’ and her love. He also does not have any children, so he is not evading his responsibility. Thus there is no trace of negative implications of Solomon’s flight. Compared to that of Smith, Milkman’s flight is also an expression of love but not the dangerous expression of self centeredness that justifies murder and pees on people. Rather now he is ready to endanger his own life for the sake of his friend. ‘For now, he knew what Shalimar knew: If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.’ (337) Milkman’s ‘surrender’ is an empowering, renunciatory act that transfigures death and loss into enduring myths of renewal and hope.

Naomi Van Tol States that ‘Song of Solomon’s final scene is disturbing and unsatisfactory for readers who prefer a definitive conclusion to stories. Morrison answers such critics by reiterating her ties to the African story telling tradition: “The talk tales are told in such a way that whoever is listening is in it and can shape it and figure it out. It’s not over just because it stops” unlike the standard ending usually found in a “western folktale where they all drop dead or live happily ever after” (Darling 253) Regarding the apparent dilemma of Song of Solomon’s ending, one critic suggests that “the question the reader should ponder in this interrogative test is not whether Milkman lives or dies but whether Milkman dies of flies.” (Wilentz 74). By allowing the reader this freedom of interpretation, “Morrison exposes the conflict of western and African cultural perceptions” yet again, in which white slave traders saw Africans committing suicide by jumping overboard in the Middle passage while black slaves saw their brothers and sisters flying back to Africa. (74)’31

The novel is open-ended allowing readers to read it in innumerable ways. Morrison displaces the white logos with the black logos but does not confer upon it the status of the transcendental signified. Moving from modernism to postmodernism (and simultaneously but very gradually from colonialism to postcolonialism), She has created ‘a (w)holy black text, one that depicts empowerment while pointing to the holes, the gap’s, the aporias in its own construction.’32

Though Milkman recovers his past and constructs his identity based on it, Milkman’s (re)construction of his family’s history itself is problematic. ‘Solomon’s flight back to Africa defines the history of Milkman’s family. It represents the family myth, their origin and the source of their names. That final, traceable experience on which Milkman seeks to centre his self, a transcendent signified of the black rural southern folk, a version of blackness, however, is itself not the ultimate origin of his family. As Susan Willis observes, “The end point of Milkman’s journey is the starting point of his race’s history in this country: slavery...[but] slavery is not portrayed as the origin of history and culture. Instead the novel opens out to Africa.” (95) Ultimately then Milkman’s family’s centre lies somewhere in Africa; however because of slavery, that past is unrecoverable. Though Milkman has discovered the centre of his family’s black experience in America, he cannot find a true transcendental signified, cannot create a “(w)holy black text.”‘33 Richard Heyman further argues that Milkman’s leap ‘reveals the centre to be an invention, a construct, a function of the interplay of Milkman’s memory and history and in the final unresolved tableau, the novel questions the validity of Milkman’s quest to (re)construct this centre.’34

Thus Morrison does not glorify black logos (still she acknowledges its necessity for the time being) because in long run it merely initiates white logos just as Macon Dead II initiates white materialism. Instead, she tries to go beyond logo centrism itself. Only when one can think about one’s identity and culture without constructing a binary opposition to somebody else’s identity and culture (either positively or negatively), one can achieve real decolonization. With her next novel, Tar Baby, Morrison achieves this decolonization where her heroine Jadine constructs a ‘whole’ and ‘authentic’ (of her own making, neither a stereotype nor a mimic) black female identity and black urban culture.

Dr Manisha Patil 

Song of Solomon:Quest for Identity/Self

 Song of Solomon 

Dr Manisha Patil 

In her first two novels, The Bluest Eye and Sula Morrison’s main focus was on the lives, aspirations and problems of African American women. But Morrison is not a narrow feminist writer but rather a ‘womanist’ one, for whom racial, cultural, national economic and political considerations are as important as sexual issues. She is also the historian/custodian of African American culture and community as a whole and community as a whole includes men as well as women. So in Song of Solomon, she has made ‘a radical shift in imagination from a female locus to a male one’ (xii). This novel is about protagonist Milkman’s quest for identity for which he has to go back to his roots in the rural South. His physical travel from north to south symbolizes his moving from materialism to spiritualism.

I. Quest for Identity/Self

Milkman is born as the single male successor/heir (almost ten years after the first two daughters are born) to a prosperous real estate agent Macon Dead and his wife Ruth Faster who is the only daughter of the very first black (Negro) doctor in the town. Though he gets all the material privileges, normally available only to rich whites and enjoys all the comforts conferred upon the youngest and only male child in the family, his personality is not developed in a normal healthy way. He carries the psychological baggage of the strained relationship between his parents and his ‘enmeshment’ – the suffocating bond parents create with their children that Morrison calls ‘anaconda love’1 – with his parents. 

Milkman’s father, Macon Dead, is representative of those hard working, ambitious black men, who desire material success in the commercial white America. His father, Macon Dead I, was an ex-slave who got this absurd name because of a white drunken soldier who filled up his form wrongly. However, he retained this name because his wife liked it. According to her, this name would wipe out the past and offer them a new fresh start. After freedom, with his hard work, Macon Dead I owned a hundred – and fifty-acre farm which he named as ‘Lincoln’s Heaven’. However, he couldn’t read or write. As a result, some white people who were jealous of his prosperity cheated him saying that he had signed some papers and so now the farm no longer belonged to him. Macon, I tried to protect his farm with all his strength. But the greedy white farmers, who were intent on stealing his land, brutally murdered him. His very young children Macon II and Pilate eye witnessed this murder and it devastated their life completely. Unfortunately, both the siblings became estranged to each other and moved in two different directions. Macon II internalized and hyperbolized his father’s ethos of work and property ownership while Pilate responded with self denial and renunciation, becoming an absolute out cast. Though the circumstances of his father’s death, create ‘a degree of sympathy for his slippage for ownership as resistance to slavery to ownership as slavery’s repetition in the “free market” of capitalism…the text also insists on how for this traumatic memory goes in distorting Macon’s access to the present: It turns him against his previously beloved sister Pilate, whom he now sees as having ‘cut the last thread of propriety’ and thus unworthy of association with a ‘propertied Negro’ (20); and it poisons his relationship with his wife, whose allegedly ‘inappropriate’ (23) relationship with her father leads to Macon’s paranoid presupposition of an incestuous relationship.’2 Macon further instils this ideology in his son Milkman and thus makes Milkman incapable of empathising with others. Macon tells Milkman, “Let me tell you now the one important thing you’ll ever need to know: Own things and let the things you own other things. Then you’ll own yourself and other people too”. (55)

Ruth’s history tells another story. Her father was the first black doctor in the city and so almost whole of the black population in the city was his client. Accordingly, the blacks spontaneously named the area where he lived as the ‘Doctor Street’. They also started using this name officially in addresses until and unless the postal department issued the notification saying that the particular area is known as Mains Avenue and not Doctor Street. Since then, blacks called it ‘Not Doctor Street’.

The intention of Northern white society to suppress black people’s identity and consign them to invisibility is palpable in the white, beaurocratic insistence that Mains Avenue was not ‘Doctor Street’. The resilient determination of the dispossessed who have named it because a black doctor lived there, triumphs in their persistent reference to it thereafter as ‘Not Doctor Street’. Humorous as it is, the underlying indignity offered to the black townspeople is not missed. The power of naming is white and the struggle for black identity begins with an insistence upon being named correctly.3

However, Dr. Foster himself was a hypocrite. He posed himself as calm and dignified but actually he was class and colour conscious. Negroes in the town worshipped him but he called them cannibals. If Macon and his father were the comrades working together, Ruth and her father had the master-servant relationship. Dr. Foster, ‘the most important Negro in the city’ (22) treated Ruth as a servant, ‘useful’ for housework and for his caretaking after his wife died. Ruth on the other hand, made her father into a demigod, alienating herself from the whole outside world: “I had no friends…but I didn’t think I ever need a friend because I had him. I was small but he was big.” (124) Even her marriage to Macon was not an outcome of love but of the obedience of a devoted daughter. As a result, even after marriage, her life was dominated by her father. She became a ‘trophy’ for which Macon and Dr. Foster contested, Dr. Foster having the upper hand because Ruth was on his side. Dr. Foster even delivered Ruth’s first two daughters himself, much against the wish of Macon. This made Macon suspicious of the incestuous relationship between father and daughter. However, he himself acknowledged that Dr. Foster could not fuck because he was addicted to ether. Still, he insisted that she was naked in the bed with Dr. Foster when he was dead. When milkman enquired about this incident, Ruth firmly refused: “No. But I did kneel there in my slip at his bedside and kiss his beautiful fingers.” (126) Ruth also explained her position as “I am a small woman. I don’t mean little; I mean small and I’m small because I am pressed small.” For both Dr. Foster and Macon, Ruth was not a person but a ‘thing’ to be possessed. Ruth knew this well and accordingly changed her weakness into the strength. She started using her ‘smallness’ as a mask to disguise her own efforts for control over the family and her obedience, deference and servility as her weapons. ‘Rather than becoming a helpless neurotic, Ruth uses Macon’s battering to fortify her position as the centre of power in the home…By depicting herself as a ‘buffoon’, she ruins herself as Macon’s ‘property’ and denies him his dream of Lincoln’s Heaven. She receives his abuse, but also renders him impotent before his children and consolidates their sympathy for her. Outside the household, Macon wields power as landlord but within his family, physical power is the only alternative he believes he possesses. If one views the process of this family’s functioning, Macon’s violence represents his futile, reprehensible effort to offset the emotional power Ruth has garnered, ironically, through her own submission.’4 With her calm matriculations, she led ‘her husband down paths from where there was no exit save violence. Lena thought Macon’s rages unaccountable. But Corinthians began to see a plan. To see how her mother had learned to bring her husband to a point, not of power (a nine year old girl could slap Ruth and get away with it) but of helplessness.’ (64)

In such a malfunctioning family, Milkman is born both innocent and accountable. Macon and Ruth both use Milkman to control each other and Milkman in turn uses everybody around him to gratify his wishes. Milkman’s conception itself was an attempt on Ruth’s part to control Macon. So it enraged Macon and he insisted on abortion. But Ruth with Pilate’s help successfully resisted Macon and in Milkman found a ‘marital surrogates’ (a male to serve) [a phase borrowed from Gary Storhoff’s ‘Anaconda Love’]. Her prolonged breast feeding of Milkman resulted in his nickname which ‘sounded dirty, intimate and hot’ (15). Instead of feeling happy for having a long awaited son after fifteen years of marriage, Macon felt bitterness and disgust at his public humiliation caused by that nickname. In turn, Macon used Milkman as a weapon for dominance and control over Ruth. As Milkman grows up, Macon gradually instilled his materialistic ideology in Milkman. Milkman helped his father not only as a real estate agent but also to steal the supposed gold from Pilate’s home. Even when Milkman slapped Macon for Ruth’s sake, Macon was actually proud that his son had really become a ‘man’. By making Milkman suspect incest between Ruth and her father, Macon gained final victory over Ruth, ‘His son belonged to him now and not to Ruth.’ (63) Since birth Milkman was placed in an untenable situation: if he pleased one, he rejected the other. This situation made Milkman selfish. He pleased or rejected not only his parents but also other people to fulfil his needs. He felt ‘everybody wants something from me’ and in turn ‘[a]pparently he thought he deserved only to be loved – from a distance, though – and given what he wanted a in turn he would be…what? Pleasant? Generous? May be all he was really saying was: I am not responsible for your pain; share your happiness with me but not your unhappiness’ (277).

This attitude of Milkman resulted in his alienation from all the people around him and objectification of those people. He followed the footsteps of his father in acquisitiveness but he never understood his father’s vision of Lincoln’s Heaven. He lived in the house with his mother and two sisters but they were never more than decorative objects in the house. Worse still, they were like the domestic slaves who were responsible for all the comforts of this master but in turn had no rights at all. Magdalene called Lena voiced the same complaint when she accused Milkman of peeing on people. “There are all kinds of ways to pee on people...You’ve been doing it to us all your life…You’ve been laughing at us all your like Corinthians. Mama. Me using us, ordering us and judging us how we cook your food; how we keep your house…Our girlhood was spent like a found nickel on you when you slept, we were quiet: when you were hungry, we cooked; when you wanted to play, we entertained you and when you got grown enough to know the difference between a woman and a two toned Ford, everything in this house stopped for you. You have yet to wash your own underwear, spread a bed, wipe the ring from your tub or mouse a fleck of your dirt from one place to another and to this day, you have never asked one of us if we were tired or sad or wanted a cup of coffee.” (215) In the similar fashion, in the outside world too, he was not able to appreciate the work or the lives of people. Though he associated with guitar as the best friend and exchanged almost everything in his life with him, ‘[t] he racial problems that consumed Guitar were the most boring of all.’ (107) Milkman was unable to attach to anybody personally because he lacked the sense of belongingness. He did not belong to the larger African American community because unlike majority of the black people, he was rich. So he was unaffected by the plight and exploitation of black masses in the white capitalist America. The stories of lynching did not touch his heart because he never thought it would affect his life. Neither in betraying Pilate by stealing her bag (which he thought was full of gold) nor in betraying Hagar’s love by using her as an object, he was at all hesitant. He lacked attachment and empathy which makes one’s life worthy. As a result, his material acquisitiveness left him spiritually bankrupt. Physically he was alive but spiritually he was dead. He had no future and so he turned towards his past. He went to south in search of gold which Macon and Pilate had left behind. But ironically, the quest for gold became the quest for self, the quest for identity. Only when he reached the end, he realized the beginning. Just like his childhood car rides where he could see only those things which went behind, in his journey to south, he realized that throughout his life what he was searching for was not gold but self-identity. Apart from the quarrels of his parents, material comforts of his house, friendship of Guitar and lust for Hagar, What he actually wanted was a meaningful self. This meaningful self can be discovered only by going back to one’s roots.

Dr Manisha Patil 

जो तुमने कहा था

 उन दिनों

तुमसे कुछ कहने के लिए

अल्फाज़ ही नहीं थे

फिर

कुछ न कहने पर

कितनी पंचायत

रस्मों रिवाजों की दुहाई

मानो

किसी तेज़ शोर के बीच

धूप की तपिश में

मैं कोहरे में नहाया हुआ था।

अतीत की स्मृतियों को

टूटे हुए आईने में

चुपचाप  देखना

अजीब सा रूखापन 

भर देता है

फिर किसी की मेहरबानी के लिए भी

बहुत देर हो चुकी थी।

कोई यह नहीं जान पाया कि

चीज़ों को इकट्ठा करने में

जब इतनी पीड़ा हो रही थी

तो मैं

उसी पीड़ा में

किसी मीठी चमक को

कैसे पा रहा था?

आखिर ये

कौन सी बीमारी थी ?

अगर मैं कुछ बताता भी तो

किसी को

कहां यकीन होता ?

मैं जहां था

वहां वक्त ही वक्त था

सिर्फ़

अपने हिसाब से

जीने की मनाही थी

किसी के लिए एकदम से

गैर जरूरी होने के दुःख से

आँखें अक्सर

नम हो जाती

इनमें बचा हुआ पानी 

कातर भाव में

कतार में रहते ।

मटमैला सा 

यह जीवन 

मौन विलाप की मुद्रा में

अदहन की तरह 

चुर रहा था 

पुख्ता छानबीन के बाद

लगता है कि

तुम्हारी यादों में ही

कहीं खो जाऊंगा

फिर

तुमसे ही आंख चुराते हुए

वही याद भी करूं

जो तुमने कहा था।

Dr Manish Kumar Mishra