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