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