Rejection versus Appropriation: Tar Baby

 Rejection versus Appropriation: Tar Baby 

Dr Manisha Patil 

Together Son and Jadine represent the dilemma of African American community as to how to deal with colonization. They represent two differing camps – Jadine favors assimilation while Son advocates cultural nationalism. Son rejects everything white – white law, white education and white-collar jobs. He says, “I don’t want to know their laws, I want to know mine.” (263) Son wants to go back to his roots – pure and authentic black culture unadulterated by white pollution. He wants to settle down in his home town Eloe, in rural South, which he had fled after killing his wife eight years ago. Although he is wandering from place to place for last eight years, Eloe has never left his mind for a minute. He is obsessed with the past. He is still nostalgically longing for the community life at Eloe – the company of Soldier, Drake, Ellen, Aunt Rosa, Old Man (his father), Beatrice and others. For him, life in the city is lonely and sad. ‘The black girls in New York City were crying and their men were looking neither to the right nor to the left’. (215) By contrast in Eloe, people care for each other. It is hard to live in a distant small town with neither welfare line nor unemployment insurance. It takes all the adult strength – physical and mental – to stay there and stay alive and keep a family together. But away from the white interference, they can support each other and have their own identity and individuality. This isolation Son views as the ideal condition for the flowering of pure and authentic black culture.

However, Jadine’s views are different. For her, ‘Eloe was rotten and more boring than ever. A burnt out place. There was no life there. Maybe a past but definitely no future...’ (259) for her, New York is the home. ‘…if ever there was a black woman’s town, New York was it...But there, there, there and there. Snapping whips behind the tellers’ windows, kicking ass at Con Edison offices, barking orders in the record companies, hospitals, public schools. They refused loans at Household Financer, withheld unemployment checks and drivers’ licenses, issued parking tickets and summonses. Gave enemas, blood transfusions and please lady don’t make me mad. They jacked up meetings in boardrooms, turned out luncheons, energized parties, redefined fashion, tipped scales, removed lids, cracked covers and turned an entire telephone company into such a dimondhead of hostility the company paid you for not talking to their operators. The manifesto was simple: “Talk shit, take none.” Jadine remembered and loved it all. This would be her city too, her place…’ (222) Jadine is a successful model whose photograph is displayed on cover page of every fashion magazine in Paris and who has got wide publicity as ‘Copper Venus’. Unlike Pecola, Nel and Hagar who are hurt by, struggle with and ultimately succumb to internalized views of white beauty, Jadine is thoroughly happy with a definition of beauty based on white standards because she fits it. Indeed, if from one perspective, her modeling means objectifying black female as a sexual object, from the other perspective, it symbolizes her power and emancipation. In white commercial America, it is impossible to think about beauty in the context of black women because beauty invariably means white skin, blue eyes and blonde hair. White women are always depicted as the desired object of sexual gratification for both white and black men. Therefore, white feminists in America have argued that to be free, women should break away with this image of sexual object. However, since black women are excluded from the concept of beauty, their liberty or sense of power lies in forcing the society to see them as sexual objects. Jadine has worked very hard not only to achieve this success but also to break away the stereotype of black women as mother which is the legacy of slavery when black women typically worked as producers of black labor force or as the wet mothers and nannies to white children. Jadine’s struggle with motherhood is best illustrated in her dreams of night women.

The women had looked awful to her: onion heels, pot bellies, hair surrendered to rags and braids. And the breasts they thrust at her like weapons were soft, loose bags closed at the tip with a brunette eye. Then the slithery black arm of the woman in yellow, stretching twelve feet, fifteen toward her and the fingers that fingered eggs. It hurt and part of the hurt was in having the vision at all – at being the helpless victim of a dream that chose you...The night women were not merely against her (and her alone, not him), not merely looking superior over their sagging breasts and folded stomachs, they seemed somehow in agreement with each other about her, and were all out to get her, tie her, bind her. Grab the person she had worked hard to become and choke it off with their soft loose tits. (261-2) 

Yet, she resists this maternal instinct with all her strength to fulfill her own version of ‘American Dream’. Jadine is the modern, career oriented African American woman who focuses on the future rather than on the past (“There is nothing any of us can do about the past but make our own lives better…that is the only revenge for us to get over.” 271) and who dares to assert individualistic values in a society where women are stereotypically expected to sacrifice themselves for the ‘community’, a euphemism which really means narrow self-interest of their men.

Jadine and Son’s different perspectives and their irreconcilability come to surface when they return from Eloe. Both try to mould each other according to their own ideals. Jadine wants Son to go to college, take a degree and then find a white-collar job. But Son resents the idea. For him, being educated is equal to being white. According to this logic, if getting education is white and becoming successful is white, then a black person who aspires to or achieves these values becomes white. The result of this underlying assumption is that blacks cannot be black and at the same time educated. Whites are educated, whites are bad. If blacks are educated, they become white i.e., bad. So, to remain black is to remain uneducated. Son goes even one step further when he wants Jadine to forget all her ‘white’ education and career and instead accompany him to a small rural town and settle down to a perfect domestic life. This is simply unthinkable for Jadine.

This rescue was not going well. She thought she was rescuing him from the night women who wanted him for themselves, wanted him to feel superior in a cradle, deferring to him; wanted her to settle for wifely competence when she could be almighty, to settle for fertility rather than originality, nurturing instead of building. He thought he was rescuing her from Valerian, meaning them, the aliens, the people who in mere 300 years had killed a world millions of years old. From Micronesia to Liverpool, from Kentucky to Dresden, they killed everything they touched, including their own coastlines, their own hills and forests...Each one was pulling the other away from the maw of hell – its very ridge top. Each knew the world as it was meant or ought to be. One had a past, the other a future and each one bore the culture to save the race in his hands. Mama-spoiled black man, will you mature with me? Culture-bearing black woman whose culture you are bearing? (269)

Frankly speaking the issue of assimilation versus cultural nationalism is one only of degree, not kind. Both white and black cultures in America share, borrow and steal elements from each other yet are reluctant to acknowledge the degree to which they are entangled. Indeed, authenticity is not just hard but impossible to find and achieve. If the African woman in the yellow dress holding three eggs is authentic, why is she then in Paris? As Ashcroft et al. points out, ‘it is not possible to return to or rediscover an absolute pre-colonial cultural purity nor is it possible to create national or regional formations entirely independent of their historical implication in European colonial enterprise.’13

Dr Manisha Patil 

Going Back to Roots: Song of Solomon

 Going Back to Roots

Dr Manisha Patil 

In the conventional American ‘Bildungsroman’ (initiation story), the protagonist moves from a rural to an urban area, from South to North, from community to individualism. Song of Solomon, on the other hand, shows the journey of Milkman from urban North to rural South, from individualism to communal sense. In the words of Catherine Lee, ‘For the authors of these slave narratives [Frederick Douglass’s Narrative and Harriet Jacob’s Incident in the life of a Slave Girl, in which the protagonist moves from an oppressive, enslaving, agrarian South to an enabling, industrial North] leaving behind family, friends and even names was often essential for escape. For the African American community in the twentieth century, however, Morrison suggests that the isolating individualism that erases the memory of the south destroys spiritual and moral identity.’ Lee further explains her point in the following words:

Milkman is indeed naïve about himself, his family and his community, but the very nature of the knowledge he acquires makes Song of Solomon as a different kind of initiation story. The initiate’s knowledge is typically defined as a loss of innocence of recognition of restriction. Milkman begins however, at the point of restriction that comes from separation, from the hyper individualization that grows out of the American culture of competition, capitalism and racism. Like the traditional American initiate, he must recognise his own capacity for evil but the knowledge of his family’s past and his place in a community that evolved from that past enables Milkman to ascend rather than conventionally, to ‘fall through knowledge’ (Fiedler 22). His journey into an African American South strips him of superficial external moorings and submerges him in the communal and spiritual culture of his larger family. With his initiation, Milkman moves from a passive, irresponsible ignorance to an active authentic and liberating participation in the corporate life of black community.4

In Part II, Milkman goes to South in search of the gold. Though the search for gold itself is corrupt, his journey is rewarding at the spiritual level. From Danville to Shalimar, he visits all the places where Macon, Pilate or his other ancestors had lived and collects the fragments of their past to solve the puzzle of their lives and to recover the holistic history of his family. First of all, at Danville, Milkman meets Reverend Cooper who greets him with, “I know your people!” These simple words give him the sense of belongingness for the first time in his life. During the next four days, the other old survivors tell him the story of his grandfather’s life, family and death. During their conversations, he discovers a totally different man, his father was. He was not ‘that stern, greedy, unloving man’ but a loving and generous son and brother. Again, for the first time in his life Milkman envisions his father’s dream of Lincoln’s Heaven and longs for the relationship that his father and grandfather shared. Macon Dead I’s farm symbolized the richness and possibility of the community. It was a ray of hope not only for Macon’s family but for the whole of African American community who saw in it the path of their liberation. But the murder of Macon Dead I, murdered that hope as well. Consequently, when the people at Danville hear about the success of Macon II, their hope is rekindled. However, Morrison shows that even at such a moment, uppermost in Milkman’s mind is the thought of gold. This is an oblique way to show that the drive to own property which meant liberation to Macon I has been perverted into selfishness and endless acquisition by Macon II and the same is perpetuated to the extreme by Macon III (Milkman). Now it is the responsibility of Milkman to rejuvenate the original vision of Lincoln’s Heaven where material prosperity co-existed with communal harmony.

From Reverend Cooper’s house, Milkman goes to Circe, the ancient wise woman who served as the midwife to Milkman’s grandmother Sing and also protected and looked after Macon II and Pilate after their father’s murder. She is the one who tells Milkman the account of Old Macon’s murder and the fact that his body was dumped in the very cave in which the gold was discovered. She is the ‘living relic of the past’5 who serves as a link between historic amnesia and present memory. She reveals the real names of Old Macon as Jake and his wife as Sing. (In her dreams, Pilate saw her father calling out the name ‘Sing’, but as Pilate did not know the name of her mother, she mistook his words as an order to sing a song) and that they came from Charlemagne, a corruption of Shalimar. (The name ‘Charlemagne’ falsifies the history by removing trace of original Afro-centric ‘Solomon’ completely and instead superimposing the Euro-centric ‘Charlemagne’). She also guides Milkman towards the Butler House and the Cave and thus moves him one more step near his lost roots. Milkman’s trips through the woods to the Butler House and the Cave start the process of shedding his old, inauthentic self. ‘To find the house he must make “a mile long walks over moist leaves”, dodging branches of overhead trees. To find the cave, he has to go deeper into the woods, crossing and falling into a creek then climbing the rocky hill side. His watch and cigarettes, those emblems of distraction and city life are smashed and soaked: his thin-soled shoes are of little help. Once inside the cave, he has only his hands, feet and instincts to guide him. His lighter sputters only long enough to show that the gold is gone. In this confrontation with a nature much wilder than the “tended woods” he knew back home, Milkman finds that some genuine feeling begins to emerge, experienced as a ravenous hunger unlike any he has known before.’6 

When Milkman goes to Shalimar, he learns one more important lesson – power of naming and importance of community – which he had devalued in his earlier life. Following his old habit of objectifying people, Milkman fails to ask the names of men in the store and calls them ‘them’. By locking his car, he reveals his mistrust and then by suggesting that he would like to have one of their women, exposes his internalized white attitude. This obviously enrages the men and they attack him. Now he learns the second lesson – neither his money can save him nor his daddy can bail him out of trouble. He is fully responsible for his actions. He has to pay the price for his mistakes and he has to defend himself with whatever is immediately at hand. Even at the age of thirty two, Milkman is still an ignorant, irresponsible and passive adolescent. To mature, he must be initiated in the African American community. The bobcat hunt for which the older men invite him serves this purpose: ‘a male initiation rite at the hands of the elders and wise men of African tribal cultures.’7

During the hunt, Milkman undergoes rapid change. He realizes that Calvin’s lamp prevents his eyes from adjusting to the dark and so he abandons the artificial light and begins to see what the night holds by penetrating the darkness with his naked eyes. Then he is able to hear the wailing from the Ryna’s Gulch – Ryna was his great grandmother who was abandoned by her husband Solomon and so went mad with sorrow. He also listens to the dogs and men signalling each other and realizes that human beings are not separate but part of the nature. As a result, otherizing and objectifying nature (as ‘land’ is objectified in real estate business) and by extension, otherizing and objectifying other people (as Macon and Milkman have done in case of poor men and all women in their life) is not possible. Man can live happily only in harmony with the nature and other people. This realization makes him ready to confront his physical limitations as well as to heal his spiritual brokenness. Because of his limp, he is not able to keep up with other hunters. Physical fatigue overtakes him and he rests under a tree, while resting, he re-evaluates all his life – he accepts his hereto forth alienating self-centeredness and also the future responsibility for sharing both the joys and sorrows of his family and friends. It is at this moment that Guitar attempts to murder him. However, his newly developed sixth sense works him of Guitar’s approach. ‘He tried to listen with his fingertips, to hear what if anything, the earth had to say and it told him quickly that someone was standing behind him and he had just enough time to raise one hand to his neck and catch the wire that fastened around his throat.’ (279) Though Milkman survives physically, metaphorically his old selfish self is dead. With his spiritual rebirth he finds that even his physical limp is gone. He is truly integrated with the community of hunters. They offer him the ‘heart’ of bobcat, metaphorically meaning the ability to empathise with others. With Milkman’s change of heart, his behaviour also changes. Earlier, Milkman had devalued Hagar’s love and had used her as a sexual object. But now his love making with Sweet (even though she is a prostitute) is mutual and redemptive. There is no objectification here, only respectful caring for each other.

He soaped and rubbed her until his skin squeaked and glistered like any she put salve on his face. He washed his hair. She sprinkled talcum on his feet. He straddled her behind and massaged her back. She put witch hazel on his swollen neck. He made up the bed. She gave him gumbo to eat. He washed the dishes. She washed his clothes and hung them out to dry. He scoured her tub. She ironed his shirt and pants. He gave her fifty dollars. She kissed his mouth. He touched her face. She said please come back. He said I’ll see you tonight. (285)

By now, Milkman has consciously accepted the aim of his journey is to discover his roots and not the gold. Now he no longer wants to escape his family but rather to embrace it. So, he goes on and meets a local Indian Woman Susan Byrd, who turns out to be the niece of his grandmother sing. Susan tells him what she knew about sing. Her real name was Singing Bird. Her mother Heddy was a Red Indian who raised a black boy, Jake. Sing and Jake grew up together and later ran away together to get married. Nobody knew where they went. From Susan’s account and by deciphering the ‘Solomon Song’ as Milkman heard children sing, he learns that Solomon belonged to a flying African tribe. He and his wife Ryna had twenty-one children all boys, Jake being the youngest. Then one day all of a sudden, Solomon leapt in the air with baby Jake to fly away to his ancestral home in Africa. He left Ryna behind. So overcome with grief, she cried for days and days and lost her mind. Unfortunately, baby Jake slipped from Solomon’s hand and fell on the ground. Then Heddy took him and raised him up like a son. Milkman also finds that there are real places known as Solomon’s leap and Ryna’s Gulch and their story is immortalized in the children’s song. This is the same song that Pilate used to sing with a slight change – ‘Sugarman’ instead of ‘Solomon’

O Sugarman done fly away

Sugarman done gone

Sugarman cut across the sky

Sugarman gone home…

The names of Solomon, Jake, Ryna and others now make sense. Now Milkman has discovered his ancestry and with it his own identity. Now he views himself as a member of the larger African American community Catherine Lee comments, ‘Gone is his failure to attach to place. Now he has roots in every place that Pilate, his father and his grandparents have lived. He shares that heritage.’8

Dr Manisha Patil 

Postcolonialism - Dr Manisha Patil

Postcolonialism

Colonialism

The entire history of the civilized world is in a sense the history of colonization. Colonization means the dominance of a strong nation over a weaker one. Colonialism happens when a strong nation sees that its material interest and affluence require that it expand outside its borders. Colonialism is the acquisition of the colonialist, by brute force, of extra markets, extra resources of raw material and manpower from the colonies. Since the ancient times wars are being fought to conquer lands and people. The conquerors have written the history praising their individual valor and cultural superiority and condemned the conquered as savages in need of control. While constructing this false textual discourse the conquerors have ignored their own atrocities against the larger humanity. For instance, the great ancient civilizations like Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians had open slavery. During the Middle Ages, crusades were fought in the name of religion but undoubtedly their main cause was material gain. In the modern era, we saw the full-fledged European colonization of the world which by the 1930s covered almost 84.6 per cent of total land surface. However what marks off modern European colonization from the earlier colonizations is not just its geographical sweep but more than that its rationalist mode. In modern colonization, power changed its style – in place of the earlier ‘bandit mode’ which was more violent but nonetheless transparent in its self-interest, greed and rapacity, the new rationalist mode ‘was pioneered by rationalists, modernists and liberals who argued that imperialism was really the messianic harbinger of civilization to the uncivilized world.’1 The white European male colonialist, while plundering the natives and territories of the colonies, fully convinced himself that he stands on high moral grounds. His basic assumptions in defense of his actions were:

• The colonized are savages in need of education and rehabilitation 

• The culture of the colonized is not up to the standard of the colonizer, and it’s the moral duty of the colonizer to do something about polishing it. 

• The colonized nation is unable to manage and run itself properly, and thus it needs the wisdom and expertise of the colonizer. 

• The colonized nation embraces a set of religious beliefs incongruent and incompatible with those of the colonizer, and consequently, it is God’s given duty of the colonizer to bring those stray people to the right path. 

• The colonized people pose dangerous threat to themselves and to the civilized world if left alone; and thus, it is in the interest of the civilized world to bring those people under control. 

The white European male systematically developed a colonial discourse which cuts across all the disciplines – science, mathematics, history, geography, literature, anthropology etc. – to develop an imperial mind set. He constructed his ‘self’ as a rationalist human (the famous quote of Descartes goes: ‘I think therefore I am’) capable of taking up new challenges, solving nature’s mysteries and on the account of his superior knowledge and cognitive faculties destined to rule the entire world. Then he developed an imperial ideology which worked at various levels. First of all, he attempted to degrade and then systematically wipe out the local languages and impose the language of colonizer. Then he degraded the local cultures including local religion, literature and even race. Then came mapping the territory – acquiring total knowledge of the landscape (including its people) and using that knowledge to control the territory. Unlike the earlier conquerors, say Alexander the Great who set out to win the world without knowing it, modern European conquerors first acquired the knowledge of their colonies and only then ventured to capture actual political power. Finally, they brought about textual reinforcement of the territorial possession by writing about the colonized land and people justifying their subjugation as mutually beneficial to both colonizer and colonized. In other words, the white Europeans adventurously penetrated into the so-called underdeveloped countries in Africa and Asia and new worlds of America and Australia, dominated the land and subjugated the natives, imposing their will at large on them. They eroded the natives’ cultures and languages, plundered the natives’ wealth and established their orders based on settlers’ supremacy

Dr Manisha Patil 

Spiritual Power of African American Woman

 Spiritual Power of African American Woman

Dr Manisha Patil 

In Song of Solomon, Morrison denounces the destructive, materialistic, individualism which is the hallmark of white American patriarchy and which has also filtered in the psyche of African American men. Instead, she celebrates constructive, community centered spiritualism of African American people epitomized in one single woman – Pilate. ‘Born without a navel, Pilate is the ancestor, an “original” first mother who like the African woman in Tar Baby who holds eggs aloft in a Parisian market, offers eggs to Milkman and Guitar. She is the ancestral mother whose contact with the natural world has remained unbroken and whom her off springs deny at their peril. With blueberry lips constantly chewing seeds and pine kernels, Pilate is surrounded both by natural food and by the relics of her past carried in the green sack of bones [of her father’s bones] and the ear-ring containing the paper on which her father had written her name. Both are relics which affirm her identity and connectedness with ancestral dead. Unmindful of possessions, her spirituality gives her unquestioning acceptance of an otherworld reality.’18

John Duvell calls her ‘female Huck Finn’19 and Robert James Butter notes that Pilate is ‘one of the very few women in American literature capable of leading the picaresque life w is given so easily to the male protagonists of our literary traditions.’20 Her Birth on her own, after the death of her mother and her father’s choice of the name Pilate (name of the man that killed Jesus) as an act of rebellion, his retaliation against God for what he perceives as a cosmic injustice, mark Pilate different from other African American women. Further on, her lack of navel prevents her from getting married and socialized as subordinate to her man. Her constant wandering from place to place and her continuous rejection by larger African American communities, make her rethink about the accepted notions of sexuality, morality and community. She ‘cuts her hair signalling a repression of her sexuality since that is what has caused her the most trouble’ and ‘establishes a woman-centred alternative community that consistently operates without regard for middle-class conventions or the expectations of men.’ Utterly indifferent to possessions, she spiritually nurtures the people. ‘She has conjure powers and potions, can defeat apparently physically stronger men and can also make tools of the police.’21 Through her posthumous communication with her father, Pilate also becomes a link between past and present, living and dead. Her song contains the oral history of her family. Her bag of bones which she calls her ‘inheritance’, testifies her abidance to her father’s commandment: “You just can’t fly on off and leave a body.” (332) She does not know that the bones she carries are of her father but she does know her responsibilities. Throughout her life, she functions as a kind of ‘pilot’, teacher and godmother to Milkman. She is responsible not only for his birth (She made Ruth conceive from Macon with her root medicine) but also for his life. Her spirituality provides Milkman with an alternative to Macon’s materialism. ‘Pilate prevents Milkman from seeking flight from his responsibilities, from perpetuating the history of neglect. Milkman eventually learns to sympathize with the painful conditions of women he is related to: that of being left behind (Ryna), mistreated (Ruth), controlled (his sisters) and devalued (Hagar).’22 The punishment that Pilate gives him (knocking him down in the cellar for Hagar’s death), makes him rethink his excitement over flying. He realizes that the joy of flying away is exceeded by the pain of those left behind. ‘He had hurt her, left her and now she was dead he was certain of it. He had left her while he dreamt of flying, Hagar was dying. Sweet’s silvery voice came back to him: “Who’d he leave behind?” He left Ryna behind and twenty-one children. Twenty-one since he dropped the one he tried to take with him and Ryna had thrown herself all over the ground, lost her mind and was still crying in a ditch. Who looked after those twenty children? Jesus Christ, he left twenty-one children!’ (332) He repents his past mistakes, gives up materialism completely and accepts responsibility for his actions. ‘When he went home that evening, he walked into the house on Not Doctor Street with almost none of the things led taken with him. But he returned with a box of Hagar’s hair.’ (334) He also realizes that it is his responsibility to take Pilate to Solomon’s leap and make her bury her father’s bones there. So accordingly, he performs his duty. Unfortunately, twisted love of Guitar makes him attack the very people he wants to protect and he fires the bullet that kills Pilate instead of Milkman. Even on her deathbed, Pilate is not bitter. She still thinks of wellbeing of others. ‘She sighed. “Watch Reba for me”. And then Ì wish I’d a knowed more people. I would a loved all. It I’d a knowed more, I would a loved more.’ (336) Pilate’s dying words mark her as a total antithesis to the Seven Days. Seven Days claimed to love African American people but their love made them kill not only whites but also blacks. ‘Christ-killing’ Pilate, on the other hand, became the Christ figure who taught people to love even their enemy. In Pilate’s selfless loving, all other forms of selfish love stand exposed and Milkman realizes: ‘Why he loved her so. Without ever leaving the ground, she could fly.’ (336) Thus, finally Milkman gains the spiritual wisdom of Pilate by knowing that one can attain freedom only by fulfilling one’s responsibilities and one can become fully individual only by attaching to one’s family, ancestry and community as a whole.

Dr Manisha Patil 

Tar Baby

 Tar Baby

Dr Manisha Patil 

In her article Periodizing Toni Morrison’s Work from The Bluest Eye to Jazz: The Importance of Tar Baby, Malin Walther Pereira proposes that taking colonization as the central concern throughout her work, Morrison’s entire work can be divided into two categories – early and later. Her early work struggles with the effects of colonization on African American individuals and the community while her later work moves into an exploration of decolonized African American culture and history. In this context, her fourth novel Tar Baby assumes a rich significance. Understanding the importance of Tar Baby to Morrison’s distancing from the colonizing effects of Euro-American culture is central to understanding how the novel divides her early and later works.

Morrison’s first four books, The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, and Tar Baby, constitute Morrison’s struggle with colonization, both for her characters and their communities, as well as in her own writing. We can see this pattern in the dialogical way in which Morrison frames her early novels: The Bluest Eye is framed with a deconstructive dialogue with the Dick and Jane children’s books; Sula, with the Bible; Song of Solomon, with the American capitalist success myth. With Tar Baby’s explicit identification of colonization as a central issue, Morrison finally breaks free from the need to focus primarily on white ideas, aesthetic or otherwise; following Tar Baby, Morrison begins publishing a trilogy, of which we now have seen Beloved and Jazz published, a trilogy focused on black history and written primarily within an African American cultural perspective. In contrast to the concern with white frames in the early novels, both Beloved and Jazz take as their frames historically documented events in black lives: Beloved, on the case of Margaret Garner; Jazz, on a photo taken by James Van Der Zee that appears in The Harlem Book of the Dead.1

Dr Manisha Patil 

Dr. Seth is on a cycle yatra across the country

 Respected Sir,

Hope you are doing well!

I am writing to you on behalf of Dr. Kiran Seth, founder, SPIC MACAY( padma shri awardee).

Dr. Seth is on a cycle yatra across the country

, to promote and preserve our heritage and spread Mahatma Gandhi’s message of simple thinking and high living and is reaching Mumbai during 6th to 9th July 2023.

We seek your support in spreading our heritage and it would be great if we have have a meeting with you and Dr. Seth during his yatra to Mumbai between 6-9 th July,

and also introduce us and help to meet some key people in finance, media and govt with Dr. Seth, who can support the movement.

We invite you as a very special guest for our All-Mumbai Regional Meet on 9th July 2023 at 3 PM at NITIE College, Powai, Mumbai.

We would be grateful if you accept our invitation for the same and join us for this meet.

With Warm Regards,

Sabyasachi Dey,

National Secretary,

SPIC MACAY,

Contact - 8108098246

African American Male Chauvinism: Song of Solomon

 African American Male Chauvinism

Dr Manisha Patil 

Milkman’s trip south to Shalimar, to the liberating discovery of family and past parallels Solomon’s return to Africa, to origins and to freedom. Yet when we celebrate Milkman’s and Solomon’s return to roots, we forget that it is nothing but the escapist male individualism. Both Solomon and Milkman leave their female counterparts Ryna and Hagar to grieve and to die broken hearted. Gurleen Grewal rightly points out that, ‘Women’s subjection, their lack of control over their own lives is the subtext of Song of Solomon.’9

Unlike her first two novels, Song of Solomon intensely foregrounds the process of identity formation in the novel’s hero (Milkman) on decidedly male grounds similarly both the title of the novel (Song of Solomon) and its one ward dedication (“Daddy”) emphasize the male genealogy. In both the processes, females, femininity and female genealogy are push to the margins. We can even go one step ahead and say that the novel, in fact, exposes the way in which the male identity and ideology are actually formed by exercising male control over women.

John Duvell, at length discusses how women are controlled by men. For this purpose, he deciphers the metaphors of doe-hunt and pea/e cock and puts the philosophy of seven Days under magnifying glass for minute analysis. When Milkman strikes Macon for hitting Ruth and comes to Guitar for comfort, Guitar’s sympathy takes the form of a brief narrative based on his hunting experience: “Anyway I stayed on the trail until I saw some bushes. The light was good and all of a sudden, I saw a rump between the branches. I dropped it with the first shot and finished it with the next. I want to tell you I was feeling good. I saw myself showing my uncles what I’d caught. But when I got up to it – and I was going real slow because I thought I right have to shoot it again – I saw it was a doe […] I felt…bad. You know what I mean? I killed a doe. A doe, man […] So I know how you felt when you saw your father hit your mother. It’s like that doe. A man shouldn’t do that. You couldn’t help what you felt.” (85) Here killing a doe metaphorically suggests hurting on African American women. In Guitar’s Realization that Milkman doesn’t grasp the metaphor (“Chances were Milkman didn’t even know what a doe was” [86]), there seems a kind of why inter textual gloss that calls into question the efficacy of the metaphor, a metaphor that suggests that the female’s safety depends upon the honour of good male hunters. In particular, Guitar’s metaphor shed a different light on his membership in the seven days and his work of hunting and killing white people.10

Another metaphor is that of pea/e cock. Several men in the novel pee on women literally and metaphorically. Chronologically speaking, the first person who is shown peeing is again Macon. When Macon discovered the gold of the old white man he had presumably killed in the cave he ‘like a burglar out on his first jet stood up to pee.’ (170) This moment anticipated the shift in relationship between Macon and Pilate. Macon waited to take gold as a compensation for the loss of their farm. Pilate on the other hand viewed this action as theft. Both were adamant on their stands and it created the permanent animosity between them. Then onwards Macon always misjudged Pilate. “That Woman’s no good. She’s a snake and can charm you like a snake, but still a snake.” (54)

Still a little boy, Milkman wets on his sister Lena during one of their Sunday car rides. This makes Lena cry. Almost twenty-five years later, Lena recalls the same moment for Milkman and turns it into a metaphor for the thoughtless way he has treated the women of the family, since ‘there are all kinds of ways to pee on people.’ (214) Lena gives a totally different perspective on Milkman’s protection of Ruth from Macon: “You are exactly like him […] You think because you hit him once that we all believe you were protecting [our mother]. Taking her side. It’s a lie. You were taking over, letting us know you had the right to tell her and all of us what to do.” (215-6) Thus if for Guitar, Milkman was protecting the doe, for Lena he was still hunting the doe. Lena questions the authority of Milkman, “Where do you get the right to decide our lives?” She herself answers the question, “I’ll tell you where. From that hog’s get that hangs down between your legs.” (215) Here Lena points out not just Milkman’s literal phallus but also his patriarchal privilege which allows him to control and select the sexuality of ‘his’ women. Though Milkman has the legitimate reason for his objection to Corinthians-Porter relationship (Porter being a member of Seven Days), he does not disclose it to Corinthians; rather he tells his father, aligning himself with the authority of the father. Macon, too, does not know about the Seven Days, but objects because Porter is his social interior.

Porter, too, is not behind in peeing on women. On the other hand, his peeing is the most spectacular in the novel. ‘Standing in the window of his attic apartment (an apartment Macon owns) the drunken Porter threatens suicide. His drunker shorts turn from a demand that the crowd of women “Send me up somebody to fuck” (25) to his assertion that “I love ya! I love ya all” (26). Between the former and the latter Porter “leaned his shotgun on the window sill, pulled out his penis and in a high arch, peed over the heads of the women, making them screen and run in a panic that the shotgun had not been able to create.” (25) Porter’s mixed messages – one of self-interest, the other suggesting altruism – take on special significance when we recall that this attempted suicide results from his work as a member of Seven Days. His ambivalent utterances, spoken in drunkenness reveal the ideological fraternity of Porter, Macon, Milkman and Guitar; despite differences of class and political perspective, each acts on the assumption of male privilege that is grounded in the possession of women. Moreover, Porter’s assertion to the women below that “I love ya” cast an odd light on Guitar’s insistence that his killing of whites is motivated purely by love of African American people.’11

Coming to the Seven Days, it is an underground organization which avenges the injustices done to the African American people. Guitar tells Milkman,

“When a Negro child, Negro woman or Negro man is killed by whites and nothing is done about it by their law and their courts, this society selects a similar victim at random and they execute him or her in a similar manner if they can. If the Negro was hanged, they hand; if a Negro was burnt, they burn; raped and murdered, they rape and murder.” (154-55)

Lynching of black men has a long history in America. It is motivated by two reasons – economic and sexual. If a black man prospers economically and thus exceeds his limit, he is eliminated all together. (e.g., Macon I) Similarly, if he becomes too bold and crosses the racial line by showing an interest in a white woman, he is squarely put into his place. The cases of lynching increased after World War I, because black American soldiers experienced a radically less segregated world in Europe (especially France) where white women were available to them sexually. Not surprising they carried the same attitude back home in America. But in America they met a different late. Among many examples, the two Guitar mentions (but leaves the sexual dimension unsaid) include a man castrated and the other blinded because white American males perceived a threat to their possession of white women. John Duvell comments,

The white males responsible for the violence against African American men were sending a particular message – one form of miscegenation, African American men and white women would not be tolerated.

Tellingly, the kinds of crimes the Days average include a number that involve sexual possession, such as the rape of an African American woman by a white man of the lynching of an African American man for his interest in a white woman.12

To give weight to Guitar’s anger and to show that the Seven Days are the reaction to the institutionalized racism in America, Morrison mentions the historical figure Emmett Till. Till, a black teenager from Chicago was murdered in Mississippi by three white men for whistling at a white woman and the three men were acquitted by an all-white jury. Commenting on this historical (not fictional) case, Guitar notes, “Ain’t no law for no colored man except the one sends him to the chair.” (82) Even after emancipation, the blacks do not have the full right to citizenship. They are still discriminated against overtly and covertly. In fact, the Jim Crow laws make the word emancipation itself meaningless. Guitar is so much perplexed by this situation that he views the African American man as ‘the supreme marginal figure; silenced not only by whites but undermined and unmanned even by African American women.’13 Guitar says,

“Everybody wants the life of a black man. Everybody, white men want us dead or quiet – which is the same thing as dead. White women, same thing. They want us, you know, universal’, human, no ‘race consciousness’. Tame, except in bed. They like a little racial loin cloth in the bed. But outside the bed they want us to be individuals. You tell them, ‘But they lynched my papa’, and they say, ‘Yeah, but you’re better than the lynchers are, so forget it.’ and black women they want your whole self. Love, they call it and understanding ‘why don’t you understand me?’ What they mean is, Don’t love anything on earth except me…They won’t even let you risk your own life – unless it’s over them. What good is man’s life if he can’t even choose what to die for?” (222-3)

Paradoxically, Guitar chooses to die for the love of African American women (and African American race as a whole). However, his whole idea of love is so twisted that for him loving is killing. All the Seven Days (including Smith) have the same delusion. Milkman (who loves nobody else other than himself) is able to penetrate this delusion. He asks Guitar, “[E]xcept for skin color, I can’t tell the difference between what the white women want from us and what the colored women want. You say they all want our life, our living life. So, if a colored woman is raped and killed, why do the Days rape and kill a white woman? Why worry about the colored woman at all?” Guitar answers, “Because she is mine.” Once again John Duvell’s comments are worth quoting:

As the chief spokesman for the Seven Days, Guitar here makes it abundantly clear that all the Days, not just Porter, pee on women, particularly African American women. In his response we see the issue of race bracketed momentarily and instead discover what is really at issue – male possession of women. Thus, the Seven Day’s ‘heroic’ stance on saving the African American race parallels Milkman’s ‘defence’ of his mother. Both are about males staking claim to women-as-property, so that we might say that the rule of Milkman in the family or of the Days in society is one and the same perpetuation of patriarchal authority, pea/e-cock power.

The Seven Days epitomizes patriarchal organization… [and excels] in its unarticulated effort to establish masculinity as violent mastery and manhood as the right to say what one’s women do. African American male violence does not simply imitate male violence. The former self-consciously imitate the later. Thus, the unrecognized mission of the Seven Days seems to be the following: if white male violence works to keep African American men from white women then African American men need to organize to insure continued property rights in African American women.14

Michael Rothberg also agrees with Duvell, on the point of imitation. He says,

Morrison’s critique of racial revenge is very clear: while the Seven Days seem to work outside the dominant system, the group’s emphasis on ‘ratio’ and ‘reason’ represent not an alternative but a mimesis of the system’s instrumental logic. The attempt to exist outside or below the surface of everyday life merely reproduces what it seeks to undermine. The price for such mimetic calculation is the breakdown suffered by Smith and others in the group and the escalation of violence within the black community, indicated by the fratricidal turn of Guitar and Milkman’s friendship and the calculated violence of Hagar’s ultimately self-destructive pursuit of Milkman. the novel suggests that conspirational politics w takes their impetus from traumas rendered to the black community end by repeating those traumas in ever more ghastly scenarios of acting out.15 

The result of this complex phenomenon is again the double colonization of African American women. They have to suffer twice – first as blacks and secondly as women. We have already seen the plight of Ruth. The condition of her daughters is no better. Their father always treated them as the decorative articles. They were provided with all the material comforts but emotionally they were starved. Macon and Ruth could never provide them with emotional support. They were also not allowed to develop intimate friendship with other children because Macon considered it to be below his dignity. Lena tells Milkman “When we were little girls, before you were born, he took us to the ice-house once. Drove us there in his Hudson. We were all dressed up and we stood there in front of those sweating black men, sucking ice out of our hands’ chiefs, leaning forward a little so as not to drip water on our dresses. There were other children there. Barefoot naked to the waist, dirty. But we stood apart, near the car, in white stockings, ribbons and gloves and when he talked to the men, he kept glancing at us, us and the car. The car and us. You see, he took us there so they could see us, envy us envy him. Then one of the little boys came over to us and put his hand on Corinthians’ hair. She offered him her piece of ice and before we knew it, he was running toward us. He knocked the ice out of her hand into the dirt and shoved us both into the car. First he displayed us then he splayed us. All our lives were like that: he would parade us like virgins through Babylon, then humiliate us like whores in Babylon.” (216) Lena did not go to college because she was afraid for her mother and wanted to protect her at home. Corinthians went to college: ‘Her education had taught her how to be an enlightened mother and wife, able to contribute to the civilization – or in her case, the civilizing – of her community.’ (188) But the things she required were totally different from what she was taught. ‘[S]he had no real skills. Bryn Maws had done what a four year dose of liberal education was designed to do: unfit her for eighty per cent of the useful work of the world. First by training her for leisure, enrichments and domestic mindlessness: Second, by clear implication that she was too good for such work.’ (189) Ruth had high expectations from both of them. She wanted them to marry doctors. But there were no suitable doctors. Then there were other professional men of colour – teachers, lawyers, mortician and even post office workers – but Lena and Corinthians were not suitable for them because they were a little too elegant. Thus, it turned out to be that they did not marry anybody. As young girls, they had started making rose petals as a way of passing time and even in their forties, they were wasting time by making rose petals. When at the age of forty-two, Corinthians realized her condition she suffered a severe depression. To come out of it, she decided to find a job. Then came the second realization (and shock) – that twenty-one years cut off from the world of the work had made her unemployable for any professional job. However, so intense was her need to be independent that finally she became a maid. ‘After graduation she returned to a work world in which colored girls, regardless of their background, were in demand for one and only one kind of work. And by 1963, Corinthians’ main concern was simply that her family not know that she had been doing it for two years.’ (189) Her job also gave her an opportunity to develop a relationship with a man – unfortunately he was Porter (one of the Seven Days). Porter wants her to give up her role of ‘a doll baby’ (196) and become a grown-up woman. What he really means is Corinthians should accept his authority instead of her father’s. In return, he promises her ‘love’ instead of the costly gifts of her father. (We have already seen that the Seven Day’s philosophy of love is destructive rather than constructive). Fortunately, (or unfortunately) Milkman comes to know about this affair and with his father’s assistance puts an end to it. Thus, Corinthians is controlled economically, sexually and as a result even mentally by all the men in her life – Macon (father), Milkman (brother), and Porter (lover). All three men are joined by the moments of urination (peeing on people).

Condition of Hagar (Pilate’s granddaughter) is even worse. Five years elder to Milkman, beautiful and whimsical, Hagar again is provided with all the material comforts but starved emotionally. Pilate and Reba were poor but they fulfilled each and every wish of Hagar because ‘all they knew to do was love her.’ (307) They sacrificed their whole selves for their ‘baby girl’ (319) but failed to develop self-worth in her. Cut off from the larger African American community and her roots in the rural South, her life was spiritually as barren as that of Milkman (before his trip south). ‘Her spiritual emptiness – “She had no self-left” (137) – is ironically balanced by her vast sense of entitlement: She believes that Milkman must love her simply because she loves him. Her feeling of entitlement is a result of Pilate and Reba’s enmeshment, their eagerness to give her everything.’16 In turn, Hager too eagerly gave her whole self to Milkman. Not just sexually but psychologically, Milkman became indispensable for her. However, its effect on Milkman was opposite. ‘It was so free, so abundant; it had lost its fervour…She [Hagar] was the third beer. Not the first one, which the throat receives with almost tearful gratitude; or the second that confirms and extends the pleasure of the first. But the third, the one you drink because it’s there, because, it can’t hurt and because what difference does it make?’ (91) By comparing her with beer Milkman devalued her just like his father devalued his sisters by comparing them with car. But Lena and Corinthians, at least tried to free themselves from the male control. For Hagar, that was unthinkable. When Milkman abandoned her, she tried to kill him. But she got trapped in a circular puzzle – she wanted to kill Milkman so that he would leave her for ever. There seemed to be no way out for Hagar. In her last desperate, attempt to win Milkman’s heart again, she fell prey to the American consumerism – she purchased all the fashionable products which promised to alter her body and to make her desirable. (In The Bluest Eye, Pecola is also the victim of same delusion – blue eyes will make her desirable by other people) However, she soon realized that outer materials cannot fill the inner void. ‘Because she can only love herself in the reflected light of Milkman’s false love, Hagar’s world is suddenly turned upside down and her love mutates into an impotent rage that rules her body and soul. After Milkman leaves town in search of tabled family gold, Hagar focuses her love-turned-hatred upon her and soon spirals into bottomless sadness.’17 Ultimately Hagar meets Ryna’s fate: ‘While [Milkman] dreamt of flying, Hagar was dying.’ (332) History is repeated once again. African American male chauvinism, reflected in Macon’s materialism, Seven Day’s philosophy of love and Milkman’s dream of flying like Solomon, has ultimately resulted in the objectification, devaluation and untimely death of African American woman.

Dr Manisha Patil