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 

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 

Reclaiming the Feminine

 Reclaiming the Feminine

Dr Manisha Patil 

In her article ‘She was laughing at their God’: Discovering the Goddess within Sula29, Michele Pessoni argues that in the Western World, the culturally ingrained ‘patriarchal fear of the feminine’ has resulted in an imbalanced society whose members remain numbed and indifferent to life and towards one another. This further results into a lot of destruction and a great sense of despair. She further states that patriarchy is ‘a psychic state of mind, a consciousness which often exhibits signs of hostility towards nature as well as towards any quality traditionally associated with the feminine: nurturance, community, contiguity. Patriarchal consciousness is oriented towards individuality, competition, personal acquisition – traits that are not necessarily harmful in themselves but which become potentially fatal to the species when they are over-valued at the expense of feminine traits. Then individuality becomes arrogance and isolation, competition becomes combat and envy, acquisition becomes possessiveness and mastery. (Pessoni: 440) For restoring balance back to the society and for cultural healing it is necessary to reconnect to the Great Goddess archetype. In Sula, Morrison depicts an impotent and decadent community which though victim of the white patriarchal system still perpetuates it instead of revolting against it. Against such a backdrop, Morrison foregrounds the ‘questing character Sula’ who ‘experiences and overcomes… the patriarchal fear of the feminine and eventually finds atonement with the spirit of the Goddess. She then becomes the missing center for all of the other characters in the novel, a powerful symbol of the spiritual force whom the entire community sought all along’. (Pessoni: 441) The community mistakenly labels Sula as evil because ‘They believed that she was laughing at their God’ (Sula: 115) For Pessoni however this image suggests that the Goddess embodied by Sula is a deity greater than the patriarchally created God who laughs at the apparent impotence of the traditional patriarchal God whose ‘magic government was going to lift them up out and away from that dirt’ (Sula: 160)

Initially, Sula too exhibits the patriarchal fear of the feminine. ‘Sula metaphorically rejects the nourishment of the mother when she insists, “I don’t like milk” (Sula: 124) The archetypal feminine terrifies Sula. After witnessing Eva’s burning of Plum, Sula views her grandmother as the living embodiment of the Terrible Mother, a destroyer equally as frightening as the patriarch’. (Pessoni: 443) In reality Eva is a powerful Demeter figure. She sacrificed her own body for her children. Later also she gave shelter to Tar Baby, three Dewey’s and other needy people. Most importantly, she did not discriminate among black, white and Mexican Dewey. Even her burning of Plum has positive connotations. Pessoni writes, ‘Like the Great Goddess in Homer’s hymn, Eva brings manhood and honor to Plum by refusing to allow him to return to the womb and by placing him in the mythic fires of the feminine which can make him as deathless as Demeter would have Demo-phoon’. (Pessoni: 445) Sula however fails to recognize these positive aspects of Eva. As a result, to protect herself she puts Eva into the old age home.

Sula’s rejection of Eva and by extension of feminine principle makes her doubly vulnerable. She becomes an example of a female mind controlled by masculine thought patterns. Morrison herself comments, ‘She is a masculine character… She will do the kinds of things that normally only men do, which is why she’s so strange. She really behaves like a man.’30 On one hand, Sula rejects the female role prescribed to her by patriarchy and on the other she fears the Goddess which has the power to overthrow that patriarchy. ‘Thus, Sula remains in a spiritual vacuum, isolated from the community which still tolerates patriarchal godhead and government, yet too frightened to make the leap towards the mythic implications of a ‘Goddess – centered morality’ wherein death does not exist.’31

Though Sula fears and dislikes Eva, her own affinity with her grandmother, is manifested in her act of cutting her own finger to protect Nel. If Eva burns her son Plum, Sula is thrilled to watch her mother Hannah dance in flames. If Eva justifies her action claiming Plum had become unregeneratable, Sula can also be forgiven to let her futile relationship destroy itself in the form of her mother. Even killing of Chicken Little was accidental and Sula regretted it a lot (unlike Nel who was secretly happy to see him fall). The difference between Sula on one hand and Eva, Nel and entire Bottom community on the other, is unlike others, Sula accepts and explores her dark thoughts and evil nature. She has transcended the hypocrisy of patriarchy – creating absolute dichotomy between good and evil – symbolized ironically by Nel by switching over to a unitary ‘Goddess-centered morality’ which considers good and evil as two sides of the same coin. ‘Ironically, her guide is male – but he is a male who has been completely destroyed by the patriarchal system.’ (Pessoni: 446) Shadrack, ‘a flasked sign of capitalism’s maddening control of man’s fate’32 becomes the priest of Great Goddess when through his madness, he gains the knowledge of death’s importance for life and hits upon the idea of ‘National Suicide Day’ to control the fear of death. His profession fishing also links him to the Great Goddess because fish and fishing both are mythic symbols of the Goddess. When upon Chicken’s death, Sula goes to his cottage, ‘the neatness, the order startled her, but more surprising was the restfulness’. (Sula: 61) For Sula, till now Shadrack had symbolized madness, drunkenness, lewd sexuality and disorder. But his great welcoming smile quietened her fear and then ‘he had said ‘always’ to convince her, assure her, of permanency’. (Sula: 157) He sees the mark over her eye brown not as a rose (goodness) or snake (evil) but as a tadpole – ‘she had a tadpole over her eye (that was how he knew she was a friend – she had the mark of a fish he loved)’ (Sula: 156). Thus at the subconscious level, he recognizes Sula’s potential affinities with the Great Goddess. Years later, when Sula has already stepped over Bottom’s code of conduct, Shadrack tips his hat to her. ‘The tipping of the hat shows a reverence, a respect, a sub conscious recognition on Shadrack’s part of Sula as the potential “flowering from the depths”, the mythic virgin/mother/crone representative of the Great Goddess herself. Sula’s response to Shadrack through most of the novel, however, is to flee. She fears the role of Kore, the virgin, which Shadrack ascribes to her for in her mind it means descent and sure death: “…she put her hand on her throat for a minute and cut out. Went running’ on up the road to home.” (117) For most of her life, Sula runs from Shadrack and from the mythic implications of atonement with the Goddess’. (Pessoni: 448) Shadrack has promised Sula permanency and though he himself misunderstands permanency as lack of death, Sula finally rightly understands its meaning as transcending the death.

…she noticed that she was not breathing, that her heart had stopped completely. A crease of fear touched her breast for any second there was sure to be a violent explosion in her brain, a gasping for breath. Then she realized or rather she sensed that there was not going to be any pain. She was not breathing because she didn’t have to. Her body did not need oxygen. She was dead.

Sula felt her face smiling. “Well, I’ll be damned”, she thought, “it didn’t even hurt. Wait’ll I tell Nel”. (149) 

When Sula overcomes her earlier ‘patriarchal fear of the feminine’ and willingly ‘returns to the womb’, she discovers that descending into those maternal waters is not a frightening or evil journey i.e. damnation at all but a transformation switching over to the eternal life. Sula becomes one with the nature – when black people sing ‘Shall We Gather at the River?’ at her funeral, Sula answers them for it begins to rain. When they actually gather at the river on 3rd January, 1941, Sula draws them into her maternal waters and simultaneously kills a tunnel built by racist and capitalist powers which symbolizes ‘destructive nature of industrialization when it takes precedence over human life’ (Pessoni: 450) and finally when Nel yearns for her, Sula manifests herself in the trees.

‘Sula?’ she whispered, gazing at the tops of trees. ‘Sula?’

Leaves stirred; mud shifted; there was the smell of overripe green things. A soft ball of fur broke and scattered like dandelion spores in the breeze. (174)

This epiphany marks the re-emergence of Great Goddess at the end of Sula who reaches her height in the figure of Pilate in Morrison’s next novel Song of Solomon. 

Dr Manisha Patil 

डॉ मनीष कुमार मिश्रा की कविताएं

 51. जब कोई पुकारता है

प्यार में

पूरी तरह डूबकर

जब कोई पुकारता है

किसी का नाम

तो वह प्रलोभन

कितना रसीला होता है !!

अपने जूड़े में

जब कोई बांधता है

मोगरे की खुशबू

चाँद के साथ

तो उसकी उम्मीदों के खातिर

परदेश में वह

कितना मचलता है

जिसे काम से

छुट्टी ही नहीं मिलती !!

उसकी आंखों के सवाल

उसकी बनावटी मुस्कान के पीछे

कितने अकुलाते हैं

इसे समझ पाना

कठिन है क्योंकि

इसके कई कारण हैं।

विचारों के बीहड़ में

विस्मृत हो चुके

कई ज़रूरी मुद्दों पर

बहस होती रहती है लेकिन

जीवन के स्तर पर

इनसे कोई प्रभावित होते

दिखाई नहीं पड़ता

ऐसे में

प्रेम जैसे प्रांजल विषय

किस तरह परखें जाएं

यह देखना अभी बाकी है

इसका असल पैमाना

सुना है

अतीत की यात्राओं में है पर

ऐसी यात्राओं के लिए

समय नहीं किसी के पास क्योंकि

आजकल

सब बहुत जल्दी में रहते हैं

इसलिए प्रेम में

खतरा तो है पर

खतरा कहां नहीं है?

52. सारी रंगतों के बीच

मेरे जैसे लोग

सारी रंगतों के बीच भी

बहुत सी खामियों के शिकार हैं

इच्छा का अभाव नहीं पर

जरूरतों की हत्या के लिए

मजबूर।

हमारे रहस्यों को

भेदने के लिए

लगभग अनुमान से ही

काम चलाना होगा

इसकी एक वजह

यह भी है कि

जो हमें अजीज़ थे

उनसे संपर्क छूट गया है और

जो बचे हैं वो

दोयम दर्जे के अधिक हैं।

बहस करने के लिए

उतना समय नहीं है कि

तार्किक ढंग से

जीवन को प्रभावित करती

कोई मान्यता

स्थापित कर सकूं ।

कट्टरता का कोई आख्यान

यहां संभव नहीं

वैसे अत्याचार की निंदा

जैसी परंपरा भी

इस चुनौतीपूर्ण समय में

पुरानी पड़ सकती है।

लेकिन

हुआ यह भी है कि

साथ जीने के लिए

भरोसा बढ़ा है

और

सफ़र जारी है । 

53. 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।

54. किसी गहरी इच्छा की तरह

बौद्धिक सतहीकरण के बीच

बढ़ता अहंकार

दायित्वबोध का अभाव

मूल्यों की गिरावट

और इन सब के बीच

आत्मविस्मृति जैसा कुछ

दरका रहा है

तरह तरह से खंडित करते हुए

घर के आंगन को

यह बता भी रहा है कि

आनेवाला संकट

बहुत चिंताजनक है।

संबंधों का

वह विशाल मैदान

अब तो जैसे

कोई सकरी बंद गली हो

जहां बहुत कुछ अधूरा

और खोया हुआ है

कहीं से लौटते हुए

इसतरह के क्षय को देखना

अवसादों में

गोते लगाने जैसा ही लगता है।

मेरा खयाल है कि

किसी गहरी इच्छा की तरह

कोई रास्ता खोजना होगा

नैतिकताओं के ज्वालमुखी से परे

थोड़ी तमीज के साथ

ताकि

बक झक पर आमादा

क्रूर विभाजन और आत्मकेंद्रीयता के

अपने ही तिलिस्म को तोड़ते हुए

हस्तक्षेप किया जा सके ।

हो सकता है

हम जितना लड़ें

उतना ही हारें लेकिन

हम टूटेंगे नहीं

राह निकालिए

धूल की परतों को हटाकर

फुर्सत मिलने पर नहीं

उलझनों के बीच ही

किसी लापरवाही की तरह

सबकुछ भुला देने से

यह बेहतर होगा कि

वापसी के प्रसंगों एवम संभावनाओं को

टटोला जाए ।

किस दिन से शुरू करें?

चलने से पहले ही

ऐसे सवाल से भी पहले

यह भी याद रखना होगा कि

रहना ही कब तक है ?

एक दिन जाना भी है

इसलिए

समय रहते

कोई राह निकालिए।

55. जब तबियत खराब होती है

बाहर की तमाम

सख्तियों के बावजूद

ऐसा तो नहीं था कि तुम

अंदर से

मुलायम नहीं थी

इसलिए

मेरा तुम्हारे लिए

फिक्रमंद होना लाज़मी था

शायद इसी कारण

कभी तुमसे

कुछ पूछने की

जरूरत नहीं पड़ी ।

जानता हूं कि

जब तबियत ख़राब होती है

तब

उस दुःख का भागीदार

और कोई नहीं होता

फिर भी

आँखें तरसती हैं

आँखों का सूनापन

अतीत में खोए हुए

सपनों की गलियों में

बेसब क्यों घूमते हैं ?

यह

कोई और नहीं जानता ।

दरवाजा खटखटाने से पहले

बस इतना याद है कि

सोचा था

तुमसे मिलता जाऊं

उसी बहाने

ढेर सारी गप्पें

कुछ टिप्पणियां

जो तुम्हें हँसा सकें

फिर भले ही वो

अनैतिक आग्रहों से जुड़ी हों

लेकिन

तुम जानती हो

मैं तुम्हारे दरवाज़े पर

दस्तक नहीं दे सकता

वहाँ नैतिकता की दीमक लगी है

इसलिए

इस बार भी

दस्तक सीधे

तुम्हारे दिल पर दी है

इस उम्मीद से कि

तुम्हें अच्छा लगा होगा क्योंकि

बाहर की तमाम

सख्तियों के बावजूद

ऐसा तो नहीं था कि तुम

अंदर से

मुलायम नहीं थी

इसलिए......।

Dr Manish Kumar Mishra

Assistant professor

Department of Hindi

K.M.Agrawal College, Kalyan west

Maharashtra