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