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 

Female Bonding

 Female Bonding

Dr Manisha Patil 

We read about Ajax and Achilles willing to die for each other but very little about the friendship of women and them having respect for each other like it’s something new. But black women had always had that, they have always been emotional life supports for each other.20

The main focus of the novel is on the friendship between Nel and Sula since childhood, through their adult years, not till the death of Sula but till Nel discovers the true value of that friendship almost twenty-four years after Sula’s death. In the chapter ‘1920’, Morrison presents Nel as the only child of a fastidious mother and absent father. Her father Wiley Wright, a cook on a ship, stayed at the port for only three days out of every sixteen. Nel’s mother Helene was born in south as the only daughter of a Creole whore. She was raised by her grandmother and kept away from the corrupting influence of her mother. The over-cautious grandmother married Helene of at a young age and social and economic security of marriage suited her well. Helene wanted to be as different from her mother as possible. So, she cultivated very dignified manners in herself and also raised her daughters to be obedient and polite. Like Geraldine in The Bluest Eye, her house was neat and well-ordered but devoid of emotions. Neatness of her house oppressed Nel. In contrast, chapter ‘1921’ describes Sula’s house a big, untidy and busy household overflowing with lodgers. Sula’s lame but influential grandmother Eva ruled this house. Eva gave shelter to many needy people like Tar Baby and three Dewey’s but burned her own son Plum. Hannah, Sula’s mother, though a widow had a steady sequence of lovers. Hannah’s unintentional yet offensive remark, “I love Sula. I just don’t like her” (57) made Sula detached from her family. As a result, although living in ‘a household of throbbing disorder constantly awry with things, voices and slamming of doors’ (52), Sula was as lonely as Nel sitting ‘on the silence of her mother’s incredibly ordered house.’ (51). Their familial settings have both similarities and differences. Both lived in predominantly female households marked by absent fathers. Yet their upbringing differed – Nel’s imagination was impeded by the stultifying restrictions of bourgeois white values while neglect suffered by a girl child in a busy household provided Sula the opportunity to ‘make’ herself. Nel and Sula’s friendship was based on the shared experience of black femaleness: ‘Because each had discovered years before that they were neither white nor male and that all freedom and triumph was forbidden to them, they had set about creating something else to be. Their meeting was fortunate, for it let them use each other to grow on. Daughters of distant mothers and incomprehensible fathers (Sula’s because he was dead; Nel’s because he wasn’t), they found in each other’s eyes the intimacy they were looking for.’ (52) Despite the differences of their family background Nel and Sula were so similar that they became alter egos for each other. Morrison says that even before their actual meeting, they had first met in the dreams. “They were solitary little girls whose loneliness was so profound it intoxicated them and sent them stumbling into Technicolored visions that always included a presence, a someone, who quite like the dreamer, shared the delight of the dream.” (51) They shared every thought, feeling and experience. They even discussed and compared their encounters with boys and most important of all, their perfect friendship was untarnished by jealous competition for boyfriends. They were ‘two throats and one eye’ (147) (as Sula described years later) meaning though their methods of expressing themselves were different, essentially, they were one and the same. Nel seemed calmer, stronger and more consistent than Sula who was feeble but headstrong. That’s why when Nel was harassed by the white boys, Sula took charge and cut her own finger with the knife challenging the boys, “If I can do that to myself, what you suppose I’ll do to you?” (55) Their ‘mutual admiration’ (55) had turned them into the mirror images so that even Nel acknowledged: ‘Talking to Sula had always been a conversation with herself.’ (95) However, their silent communion was so perfect and wholesome that no other form of communication was required. 

Sula lifted her head and joined Nel in the grass play. In concert, without ever meeting each other’s eyes, they stroked the blades up and down, up and down. Nel found a thick twig and with her thumbnail, pulled away its bark until it was stripped to a smooth, creamy innocence. Sula looked about and found one too. When both twigs were undressed. Nel moved easily to the next stage and began tearing up rooted grass to make a bare: spot on earth. When a generous clearing was made, Sula traced intricate patterns in it with her twig. At first Nel was content to do the same. But soon she grew impatient and poked her twig rhythmically and intensely into the earth, making a small neat hole that grew deeper and wider with the least manipulation of her twig. Sula copied her and soon each had a hole the size of a cup. Nel began a more strenuous digging and rising to her knee, was careful to scoop out the dirt as she made her hole deeper. Together they worked until the two holes were one and the same. When the depression was the size of a small dishpan, Nel’s twig broke. With a gesture of disgust, she threw the pieces into the whole they had made Sula threw hers in too. Nel saw a bottle cap and tossed it in as well. Each then looked around for more debris to throw into the hole: paper, bits of glass, butts of cigarettes, unit all of the small defiling things they could find were collected there. Carefully they replaced the soil and covered the entire grave with uprooted grass. 

Neither one had spoken a world. (58-59) 

This grass play scene is an emotionally and sexually charged scene in the novel. Like Clarissa and Sally in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Nel and Sula’s intense friendship contains at least the potential for romantic love. But breaking of Nel’s twig and her ‘gesture of disgust’ forecloses any such possibility. Similarly, their covering the ‘grave’ foreshadows the death of Chicken Little. ‘Sula picked him up by his hands and swung him outward, then around and around. His knickers ballooned and his shrieks of frightened joy startled the birds and the fat grasshoppers. When he slipped from her hands and sailed away out over the water, they could still hear his bubbly laughter.’ (60-61)

The former incidents of Sula’s cutting her finger and the grass play throw another light on the killing of Chicken Little. Nel’s domain is that of thinking and feeling while Sula’s domain is that of acting. While Nel suppresses her impulse to act, Sula’s impulsive actions manifest Nel’s unspoken wishes.

According to John Duvell, what Sula’s act does at a literal level is to rid the girls of the unwanted male who intrudes on their play at a moment in their development when they stand between innocence and experience; that is they are aware of their budding sexuality though they have not yet experienced sex.21 Eva Birch sums up the communion of the two in the following words.

Sula and Nel develop an intimacy, which some feminist critics interpret as subconsciously lesbian...In adulthood both girls find fulfillment in heterosexual relationships, and even allow these to subjugate an emotional bond founded in the lonely interdependence and the shared dreams of girlhood. Together they discover sexuality in the tentative sexual invitations thrown out by boys. They also learn that as females they are destined to become sex objects in a hierarchical society, which assigns them the least important role. They grow into a world first fashioned for whites, then for males and lastly for black women. In a society constructed on racial and gender differentiation they discover that “all freedom and triumph was forbidden to them”. Their answer to these social realities is to establish a “something else” in a friendship so intense that, when Nel is threatened by young white boys, Sula, like Eva, is prepared to mutilate herself, cutting her own finger with the knife, with the warning, ‘If I can do that to myself, what you suppose I’ll do to you?’ (55) This initiation into blood intimacy, which is traditionally associated with the initiation of men into brotherhood, is emphasized in a strangely sexual and ritualistic digging and filling of a hole, as if the girls are subconsciously anticipating an adult sexuality that they know will signal the end of girlhood. This communion of shared but unspoken knowledge is consummated in their joint complicity in the accidental drowning of a small black boy.22

This incident is a turning point in Sula’s life. For Sula, it is the second blow to her self-concept. The first one was overhearing her mother say, “I love Sula. I just don’t like her” (57), which made her aware of the hollowness of relationship. In the second case, her accidental drowning of Chicken Little introduced her to the inside nothing. These two incidents together taught her neither to count on somebody else nor to count on one’s own self.

Nel however thrived on the crisis. While Sula drowned Chicken Little, Nel watched. When Sula went to Shadrack’s house to enquire whether he saw it and possibly to ask for help, Nel hushed up the matter. It also marked Nel’s moving away from Sula. During the funeral, Nel stood apart from Sula. ‘There was a space, a separateness between them’. (64) Sula cried and cried ‘simply’ and ‘soundlessly’ but Nel afraid of being caught distanced herself from Sula (‘Nel and Sula did not touch hands or look at each other during the funeral’ [64]) and casted herself as the innocent victim (“Although she knew she had ‘done nothing’, she felt convicted and hanged right there in pew”. [65]) Once the coffin was buried Nel and Sula again came closer. ‘...the space that had sat between them in the pews had dissolved... as they stood there their hands were clenched together’. (66) However, Nel’s behavior foreshadows her deserting Sula and turning conventional.

In fact, Nel’s marriage to Jude is not the cause of Nel’s turning conventional, but rather result of it. The process had begun long back and by 1927 it was almost complete. ‘Her parents had succeeded in rubbing down to a dull glow any sparkle or splutter she had.’ (83) As a result, though internally Nel and Sula were identical – having same thoughts, feelings and ideas (‘their friendship was so close, they themselves had difficulty in distinguishing one’s thought from the other’s... In those days, a compliment to one was a compliment to the other and cruelty to one was a challenge to the other.’ [83-4]) – outwardly Nel’s ‘response’ to Jude ‘selected her away from Sula’. Nel herself was flattered by her unique status (as against shared experiences with Sula) and so prioritized marriage over friendship. (‘Greater than friendship was this new feeling of being needed by someone who saw her singly’ [84]). Though initially even Sula was excited over Nel’s marriage, during the reception, she realized that Nel had deserted her for Jude (Nel ‘raised her eyes to him for one more look of reassurance’ [85]). In response to Nel’s withdrawal, Sula left Medallion to explore herself as a separate person. 

Years back, as a ten-year-old girl, Nel had got her only chance to leave Bottom for a trip South to New Orleans. It was an exhilarating but fearful journey. Though it was her first intense encounter with racism in America, it was her first and last chance to break the mould and find her own identity. “I’m me. I’m not their daughter. I’m not Nel. I’m me. Me”. (28) It is Sula who after Nel’s marriage went on a long trip for ten years and came back as an independent individual. However, the question remains, why did Sula return to Bottom? During those ten years, Sula had attended college but her main search was to find an emotional substitute for Nel. Unfortunately, there was no substitute for Nel and so Sula came back to reclaim Nel. However, during those ten years Nel and Sula had moved further away in the opposite directions. Nel had accepted the standards of Bottom and became ‘an angel in the house’ while Sula had refuted all those standards and so was termed as ‘bitch’ by the Bottom people. Nel and Sula, themselves unaware of the change in their perspectives, cheered up at the thought of renewed friendship but soon their differences become clear. Rachel Lee rightly points out that, ‘After Sula’s return to Medallion, she and Nel engage in familiar yet unfamiliar banter: “You been gone too long, Sula”. “Not too long, but may be too far”. “Want some cool tea?” (96) While the reader may variously interpret Sula’s suggestion that she has gone ‘too far’ (i.e. she has reached a different value system or has overstepped consensus boundaries) Nel doesn’t conjecture these meanings. Rather, the conversation turns to the distancing etiquette of proffered ‘tea’. Nel’s puzzlement over what Sula ‘means’ is in itself an oddity, for the two women’s history has been marked by an uncanny unison of thinking and movement that does not require words.’23

 Seen in the above light, Sula-Jude affair reveals another meaning. Nel conventionally regarded it as a betrayal and dispossession. She felt doubly wronged by both her husband and the best friend and the pain of this double injury was unbearable. ‘That was too much. To lose Jude and not have Sula to talk about because it was Sula he left her for.’ (110) Sula’s intention however was not to hurt Nel. ‘She had clung to Nel as the closest thing to both an other and a self, only to discover that she and Nel were not one and the same thing. She had no thought at all of causing Nel pain when she bedded down with Jude. They had always shared the affection of other people, compared how a boy kissed, what line he used with one and then the other. Marriage, apparently, had changed all that, but having had no intimate knowledge of marriage, having lived in a house with women who thought all men available and selected from among them with a care only for their tastes, she was ill prepared for the possessiveness of the one person she felt close to.’ (119) Eva Birch says, ‘incapable of feeling possessive herself, Sula does not regard Jude as Nel’s possession, and views her own ensuring affair with him as a sharing rather than a dispossession. Nel however sees it as a betrayal, and both marriage and friendship are destroyed.’24

On Sula’s deathbed, Nel accused Sula of mistreating her. Nel asked Sula, “But what about me? What about me? Why didn’t you think about me? Didn’t I count? I never hurt you…We were friends…and you didn’t love me enough to leave him alone. To let him love me. You had to take him away”. Sula counter-questioned her, “What you mean take him away? I didn’t kill him, I just fucked him. If we were such good friends, how come you couldn’t get over it?” (144-5) 

Similarly, John Duvell also says, ‘Sula’s having sex with Jude, I wish to argue, is not a function of her interest in him per se or in men and heterosexuality generally but rather in her desire to better know her female friends desire.’25

Unfortunately, it turned Nel into an enemy. Then Sula again focused on herself and went on with her mission of making herself. John Duvell notes that, ‘Sula is an individual who should have but did not become an artist.’26 Morrison writes, ‘In a way, her strangeness, her naiveté, her carving for the other half of her equation was the consequence of an idle imagination. Had she paint or clay or knew the discipline of the dance or strings, had she anything to engage her tremendous curiosity and her gift for metaphor, she might have exchanged the restlessness and preoccupation with him for an activity that provided her with all she yearned for. And like any artist with no art form, she became dangerous.’ (121) In lack of an art form, Sula turned her body into a medium. She used sex as empowering means of defining herself: ‘there was almost irony and outrage in lying under someone in a position of surrender, feeling her own abiding strength and limitless power’. (123) She was not interested in sexual aesthetics. Initially she considered lovemaking as ‘a special kind of joy’, then ‘wicked’, then empowering and finally as a means of ‘solitude’. Her coupling with men did not reduce but rather aggravated her loneliness. She started yearning for the ‘post coital private ness in which she met herself, welcomed herself and joined herself in matchless harmony’. (123) 

Then came Ajax who approached her as an equal. Years back he had shouted the word ‘pig meat’ towards Nel and Sula and they had experienced their first sexual excitement. Since then she was curious about him. Unconventional like Sula herself, Ajax too was aroused to curiosity by her ‘elusiveness and indifference to established habits of behavior’. (127) He did not bring any money to her but two milk bottles which he picked up off the porch of some white family. The bottles ‘looked precious and clean and permanent. She had the distinct impression that he had done something dangerous to get them’. (124) He also gave her the ‘real pleasure’ by talking to her. Apart from Nel, nobody else had respected her mind as Ajax did. ‘They had genuine conversations. He did not speak down to her or at her, nor content himself with puerile questions about her life or monologues of his own activities. Thinking she was possibly brilliant, like his mother, he seemed to expect brilliance from her and she delivered. And in all of it, he listened more than he spoke. His clear comfort at being in her presence, his lazy willingness to tell her all about fixes and the powers of plants his refusal to baby or protect her, his assumption that she was both tough and wise – all of that coupled with a wide generosity of spirit only occasionally erupting into vengeance sustained Sula’s interest and enthusiasm’. (127-8) Ajax allowed Sula to take up culturally masculine position (‘He liked for her to mount him so he could see her towering above him and call soft obscenities up into her face’ [129]) and imagine herself as an artist – sculptor. She imagined three layers of Ajax’s body – black gold, alabaster – which if removed one by one using cloth, nail, chisel and small tap hammer would ultimately reveal ‘the loam, fertile, free of pebbles and twigs…I will put my hand deep into your soil, lift it, shift it with my fingers, feel its warm surface and dewy chill below… I will water your soil, keep it rich and moist. But how much? How much water to keep the loam moist? And how much loam will I need to keep my water still? And when do the two make mud?’ (130-1) Here Sula gave free reign to her imagination associating Ajax with loam, herself with water and their communion as mud. However, her proportion of loam and water went wrong. In Sula-Ajax relationship, she tried to replicate two different relationships – first Nel and Sula and second Nel and Jude. In the first, she compared Ajax with Nel – someone who allowed her to be her authentic self and reflected it back to her in his/her own self. In the second, she tried to convert Sula-Ajax relationship into Nel-Jude relationship – two of them making one self. She discovered possession as ‘new and alien a feeling’. By possessing Ajax, he tried to possess Nel (by herself taking up Nel’s role of an ideal wife) and thereby her own self. However, when Ajax left leaving his only trace in his driving license which referred to him as ‘A. Jacks’ and not Ajax, Sula finally confronted the impossibility of creating a wholistic self by fusing self and other together. John Duvell comments, ‘In this gap opened in the phonetic misapprehension – a space between signifier and signified – Sula’s sense of the stability of both Ajax’s and her own identity dissolves, a moment that simultaneously calls into doubt Sula’s heterosexual relationship with Ajax as the grounding of her authentic self.’27 Here readers are reminded of Sula’s earlier discovery: ‘She had been looking all along for a friend and it took her a while to discover that a lover was not a comrade and could never be – for a woman’ (121) 

The next meeting of Sula and her comrade Nel took place directly in 1940, when Sula was terminally ill with neither money to buy medicine nor anybody to take her care. Greeting Nel as if there had been no interruption in their friendship, Sula again challenged the accepted notions of the society which were now represented by Nel.

“You can’t do it all. You a woman and a colored woman at that. You can’t act like a man. You can’t be walking around all independent like, doing whatever you like, taking what you want, leaving what you don’t”. […]

“You say I’m a woman and colored. Ain’t that the same as being a man? […]I know what every colored woman in this country is doing [...] Dying. Just like me. But the difference is they dying like a stump. Me, I’m going down like one of those red – woods. I sure did live in this world […] I got my mind. And what goes on in it. Which is to say, I got me”.

“Lonely, ain’t I?”

“Yes. But my lonely is mine. Now your lonely is somebody else’s. Made by somebody else and handed to you. Ain’t that something? A secondary lonely”. (142-3)

Their differing attitudes leave the reader, like Sula asking Nel if she is so sure that she was right. Rita Bergenholtz comments, ‘Toni Morrison clearly wants us to recognize that although Nel and Sula appear to be quite different – one the epitome of goodness and the other the embodiment of evil – they are also quite similar. That is, if Sula is evil for watching Hannah dance in pain as flames melt her lovely skin, then Nel is also evil for experiencing a sense of pleasure and tranquility when Chicken Little disappears beneath the water. (170) The “Wright” approach to morality judges an action evil only if it is witnessed by others. In contrast Morrison suggests that the distinction between good and evil is rarely so clear-cut as Helene and Nel suppose, consequently, there is some good and some evil in both Sula and in Nel. The most significant difference between the women might be that Sula accepts the fuzziness of moral categories with her usual good humor, whereas Nel refuses to look at the unacceptable aspects of herself, aspects which confound her clichéd thinking. In fact, Sula’s ability to laugh at herself may be her most redeeming quality.’28 Sula greeted even death with smile and thereby transcended it. ‘Sula felt her face smiling. “Well, I’ll be damned”, she thought, “It didn’t even hurt. Wait till I tell Nel”‘ (149) It is significant that Sula’s abiding thought at the moment of death is that of Nel and not Ajax as Sula had rightly recognized that ‘the other half of her equation’ is nobody else but Nel. Nel, however, blinded by her binary thinking, avoided the truth for almost 25 years. All these years, she stubbornly clinged to the misapprehension that she was good and Sula was bad. It is finally in 1965, when she went to the old age home to see Eva that she is forced to remove her blinkers and confront the truth. Eva bluntly asked her, “Tell me how you killed that little boy?” Nel tried to wash her hands of the matter saying, ‘I didn’t throw no little boy in the river. That was Sula”. But Eva insisted, “You. Sula. What is the difference? You was watched, didn’t you? Me, I never would’ve watched”. (168) Eva further emphasized, “Just alike. Both of you. Never was no difference between you”. (169) Nel, for the first time in forty-three years, introspected, ‘Why didn’t I feel bad when it happened? How come it felt so good to see him fall?’ Then she realized, ‘All these years she had been secretly proud at her calm, controlled behavior when Sula was uncontrollable, her compassion for Sula’s frightened and shamed eyes. Now it seemed that what she had thought was maturity, serenity and compassion was only the tranquility that follows a joyful stimulation. Just as the water closed peacefully over the turbulence of Chicken Little’s body, so had contentment washed over her enjoyment.’ (170) This realization led Nel to other insights. She recognized that Eva was mean, town’s people were spiteful. (‘The same spite that galloped all over the Bottom. That made every gesture an offence, every off-center smile a threat’ [171]) and all the while she had missed Sula (‘All that time, all that time, I thought I was missing Jude…we was girls together…O Lord, Sula, girl, girl, girl, girlgirlgirl.’ [174]) Nel’s mourning for Sula completes the female bonding which reclaims the feminine as the balancing force in the 20th century racist, sexist and classist world. 

Dr Manisha Patil 

Black Women’s Freedom

 Black Women’s Freedom

Dr Manisha Patil 

Female freedom always means sexual freedom, even when – especially when – it is seen through the prism of economic freedom. The sexual freedom of Hannah Peace was my entrance into the story, constructed from shreds of memory about the way local women regarded a certain kind of female – envy coupled with amused approbation. Against her fairly modest claims to personal liberty are placed conventional and anarchic ones: Eva’s physical sacrifice for economic freedom; Nel’s accommodation to the protection marriage promises; Sula’s resistance to either sacrifice or accommodation. Hannah’s claims are acceptable in her neighborhood because they are non-financial and non-threatening; she does not disturb or deplete family resources. Because her dependence is on another woman, Eva, who has both money and authority, she is not competitive. But Sula although she does nothing so horrendous as what Eva does, is seen by the townspeople as not just competitive, but devouring, evil. Nel, with the most minimal demands, is seen as the muted standard. (xiii)

Suffering from the ‘geometric’ oppression of sex, race and class, black women in America are perhaps the last group with any chance of being really free. Theoretically, everybody is born free and equal, but practically, black women’s freedom and equality are curtailed at every step. They are made ‘the mule of the world’ with all the responsibilities and no rights. White feminists can afford to break their incompatible marriages and live independently. They can also choose to be single parents because they have the required economic resources and can hire domestic helps. Thus, single parenthood becomes an expression of power for them. In The Bluest Eye, Polly’s white mistress gives her the advice to leave her husband but Polly refuses to do so. In Sula, Eva’s husband Boyboy, leaves her and forces her to be a single parent. For Eva, this freedom is not an expression of power but of powerlessness. Commenting on the difference between white feminists and black women, Morrison says, ‘It’s not just the question of color but of the color of experience’13 and the experience tells us that black men can leave black women but not vice versa because economically and psychologically, black women remain dependent on black men. Its main reason is the lack of fair economic opportunities for black women. A single black woman without economic security can easily be reduced to prostitution. So marriage is considered to be a social and economic guarantee. Wives trade sex for security. e.g. Helene, Nel’s mother, herself a daughter of a Creole whore hurriedly got married to Wiley Wright, a sea-man with constant income. However, Eva’s case shows that marriage is not a life-time guarantee. The pressure to become a prostitute is even more on Eva because she has the added responsibility of three children. Yet she evades this fate by physical sacrifice. Her daughter Hannah becomes widow but she gets economic security through Eva. So Hannah can freely gratify her sexual desire without being resorting to prostitution. However, Hannah’s suicide poses questions about sufficiency of economic security and sexual gratification to fulfill female desire for freedom.

This illusive quest for freedom continues in the next generation also. At an early age, Nel and Sula discover that ‘they were neither white nor male and that all freedom and triumph was forbidden to them’ (52) but they respond to this fact in different ways. Like her mother Helene, Nel again compromises her freedom for social and economic security of marriage. However, like Eva Nel too is abandoned by her husband to feed three children. Unlike Eva Nel’s sacrifice is psychological rather than physical. She amputates her ‘self’. She works hard to be economically secure but curbs her sexuality. “O Jesus, I could be a mule or plow the furrows with my hands if need be if I knew that somewhere in this world in the pocket of some night, I could open my legs to some cowboy lean hips but you are trying to tell me no and O my sweet Jesus what kind of cross is that?” (111) Thus, Nel forces herself to fit into the stereotypes of ideal daughter, wife and mother at the cost of herself.

Sula takes another turn. She becomes different from Nel and all other women because she asserts herself in the most unlikely situations. Morrison says, ‘She is new world black and new world woman extracting choice from choicelessness responding inventively to found things. Improvisational, daring, disruptive, imaginative, modern, out-of-the-house, outlawed, unpolicing, uncontained and uncontainable and dangerously female.’14 Sula asserts her absolute autonomy.

The critical difference between Eva and Sula is that the older woman had her power thrust on her by bitter circumstances and she bore both a deep pride and a bitter circumstances and she bore both a deep pride and a bitter grudge for bearing that burden. Sula on the other hand, wants to find and exert the power of her own life, a choice the older generation of women did not have. It is also a choice the Bottom as a collective does not have. For Sula, putting her grandmother away in an old age home becomes an act of self-preservation encouraged by Eva’s domineering behavior; to the community it is a scandal.15 

Sula does not resort to physical or psychological sacrifice for economic freedom. She neither represses her sexuality nor becomes a prostitute. She picks up and drops men just like men pick up and drop a woman. Her life’s project is to make her ‘self’. She tells Eva, “I don’t want to make somebody else. I want to make myself”. (92). But social conditions are not conductive to such project. Sula refuses to fuse herself into a man’s self to make him complete (as Nel had done for Jude). Instead she is looking for someone who will complete her. After trying on many men, she realizes than no man can complement her as Nel had done in her childhood. But Sula and Jude’s affair has already turned Nel into an enemy. Ajax, a free and complete man, provides Sula a hope to complete herself. Their affair is based on mutual respect. Yet the difference in their gender makes their lives different. ‘A disfranchised black man outside the white man’s economy and the law Ajax cannot fulfill his desire to fly airplanes, yet he is at home in the community of the Bottom, which nurses his wounds. Women fight each other for him, his mother nurtures him without demands, he does not have to answer to anything but his own whims and certainly nobody castigates him for the relationships he does or does not have. This however is not the case with Sula. Though she has ventured outside her community and become worldly wise, inside the community, she steps into the sheltered space of her mother’s house; outside it, there is no place for her. Because of the sexual liberties she takes her status in the community is liminal. From his makeshift, male-centered world, Ajax cannot relate to her lonesome predicament. Sula’s invitation to him to lean on her signals to him her need to claim him. Sensing in her a proclivity for ‘the nest’, Ajax leaves Sula. While his rejection of Sula signifies his rejection of the structural imperatives of being a man (which he recognizes as an impossibility), his departure also signifies his inability to identify with Sula’s own rejection of the structural imperatives of gender roles in her life.’16 Ajax is complete in himself but he is not interested in making Sula complete. Curious, fearless and adventurous, Ajax is least interested in making a life-time attachment. When Sula shows interest in fusing their two selves and expects fidelity from and offers it to Ajax, he leaves. From his driving license, Sula comes to know that his name is ‘A. Jacks’ and not ‘Ajax’. So she realizes that even an unconventional man like Ajax cannot understand her urge for being free and attached simultaneously (as Ajax is). Worse still, it makes her confront the bitter truth for one last time – there is no chance for a black woman to be really free and happy in this country, at this particular time – which makes her sick and culminates in her premature death. 

Sula is a new world woman who exercises choice out of choicelessness. While other woman like Eva and Nel are forced to be alone, Sula cultivates aloneness. Sula tells Nel, “My lonely is mine. Now your lonely is somebody else’s. Made by somebody else and handed to you. Ain’t that something? A secondary lonely”. (143) (Maggie Gale house says, ‘...the town’s judgment is very specific: it is all right if Sula ends up alone, but it is not all right for Sula to cultivate aloneness’)17 Similarly, while other woman die a slow death, Sula accelerates her death. She thinks to herself, “There aren’t any more new songs and I have sung all the ones there are”, (137) and then proceeds further to experience the one last experience of life – death. On her deathbed she again tells Nel, “I know what every colored woman in this country is doing... Dying. Just like me. But the difference is, they dying like a stump. Me, I’m going down like one of those red-woods. I sure did live in this world”. (143) Unlike Nel, Sula never falls prey to self-pity. Through her willingness to die she even conquers death. Following the well-known proverb ‘Life is an ice-cream, eat it before it melts’, Sula tastes all the flavors of life, sweet as well as bitter, with equal interest while Nel and others let their lives melt. While Sula lives even posthumously, others experience death in life. The only way to free themselves is to embrace death.

Coming back to the Nigger joke, the text says, ‘Freedom was easy – the farmer had no objection to that.’ (5) Commenting on it, Rita Bergenholtz says, ‘if there is a message in this novel, it seems to me that it is precisely the opposite: Freedom is never easy. However, Morrison is more concerned with posing questions than with delivering messages. What, we might ask, does freedom really mean. Like all of the Black women up in the bottom Nel is free. Yet for forty-three years she labors under the burden of assuming that she must be the good girl and Sula the evil one. Is this freedom? Nel’s husband Jude is also free. Yet Jude wastes his adult life telling ‘whiney tales’ mostly about how ‘a Negro man has a hard row to hoe in this world’ and other such confronting clichés (103). Is that freedom? Morrison provides no answers, her goal like that of many a satirist, is to provoke thought. For only by frequently inquiring what it means to be free, to be in love, to be human, to be black or white, to be good or evil can we truly be alive.’18

In Decolonizing the Mind, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o states that mere physical decolonization is not enough. Colonization affects not just the socio-economic-political conditions of the colonized; its main target is the psyche of the colonized. By using its biggest weapon ‘the cultural bomb’ imperialism creates inferiority complex in the colonized. ‘The effect of a cultural bomb is to annihilate a people’s belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves.’19

Colonization turns the colonized into a caged bird. S/he becomes so habitual to the caged life that even when the door of cage is opened, it does not fly. Too long stay in the cage not only weakens its wings but also cripples its psyche. So when the cage is finally opened, the bird must re-learn flying. This is what is decolonizing the mind means – rebuilding faith in one’s capacities and oneself. Sula has not only relearned to fly, she enjoys that flying. (Flying becomes the chief motif in Morrison’s next novel Song of Solomon). Nel however remains caged even when the door is open. Only when Nel recognizes the joy of flying and value of Sula as her alter ego, she is finally able to connect with Sula. Her final cry for Sula liberated her from self-imposed imprisonment and points towards female bonding as a means of decolonizing the minds of women.

Dr Manisha Patil 

जब तबियत ख़राब होती है।

 जब तबियत ख़राब 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......।

डॉ मनीष कुमार मिश्रा

के एम अग्रवाल महाविद्यालय

कल्याण पश्चिम

महाराष्ट्र 

एक ऑनलाइन कांफ्रेंस

 नमस्कार। जय गुरु देव। आगामी 24 जून 2023 शनिवार को मैं, संत गुरु रविदास जी पर एक ऑनलाइन कांफ्रेंस आयोजित कर रहा हूं। यदि आपने गुरु रविदास जी पर कुछ शोध परक लेख लिखा है, या लिखना चाहते हैं तो आपका कांफ्रेंस में स्वागत है। हम  अपने जवाहर लाल नेहरू विश्वविद्यालय नई दिल्ली  में नवंबर 2023 में एक अंतर्राष्ट्रीय  कांफ्रेंस आयोजित करने की योजना बना रहे हैं। उस कांफ्रेंस में कुछ महत्वपूर्ण शोध पत्रों  को चयनित कर समुचित  मानदेय के साथ पुरष्कृत किया जायेगा। यदि आप  उसमें प्रतिभागिता करना चाहतें हैं तो इस व्हाट्सएप ग्रुप को  ज्वाइन कर लें। शोध लेखों की विषय वस्तु एवं  अन्य सूचनाएं आपको यहां मिलती रहेगी। अग्रिम धन्यवाद सहित। 

डा राजेश पासवान

एसोसिएट प्रोफेसर, हिन्दी

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Sula : Community

 Sula : Community

Dr Manisha Patil 

Under such heavy pressures, it is but natural that African Americans huddle together to support each other against the odds of white America. That’s why community becomes such an important aspect of literary works by African American writers. Morrison too places a lot of emphasis on community in her works. Though primary subject of Sula is the lives and friendship of Sula and Nel, it is the community life at Bottom that moulds them. In fact, we cannot understand Sula without understanding the black community. Barbara Christian notes, ‘Like the ancestral African tradition, place is as important as the human actors, for the land is a participant in the maintenance of the folk tradition. It is one of the necessary constants through which the folk dramatize the meaning of life, as it is passed on from one generation to the next. Setting then is organic to the characters view of themselves.’8

Morrison gives the fascinating picture of Bottom life with ‘a dark woman in a flowered dress doing a bit of cakewalk, a bit of black bottom, a bit of ‘messing around’ to the lively notes of a mouth organ. Her bare feet would raise the saffron dust that floated down on the coveralls and bunion-split shoes of the man breathing music in and out of his harmonica. The black people watching her would laugh and rub their knees.’ (4) This is the community, which both nourishes and destroys its members. It is nurturing because it creates the survival instinct in its members, which gives them the strength to live against all odds of life.

Plague and drought were as natural as springtime. If milk could curdle, God knows robins could fall. The purpose of evil was to survive it and they determined (without ever knowing they had made up their mind to do it) to survive floods, white people, tuberculosis, famine and ignorance. They knew anger well but not despair and they didn’t stone sinners for the same reason they didn’t commit suicide – it was beneath them. (90)

However, it is also a destroyer because it does not provide its members with any positive model of identity, resistance and decolonization. Susan Neal Mayberry gives us the example of Deweys. ‘Individually each Dewey is a lost boy, collectively, as the Deweys or Lost boys, they find an identity. Even their white teacher is astonished at how much the Deweys, who initially look nothing alike, become gradually indistinguishable. While the Dewey system and chain gang serve as a collective self, however, they also consume the individuality of these Lost Boys and prevent their growing up.’9 Similarly, on the surface, Bottom community seems to be united to support each other during the hardships. But internally, this community is fractured. Within the community each individual is as isolated as African American community is in the white America. At Chicken Little’s funeral, this alienation within the community becomes apparent. As Rev. Deal preaches, Bottom people mourn not for the dead child but for themselves. ‘They did not hear all of what he said; they heard the one word or phrase or inflection that was for them the connection between the event and themselves. For some it was the term ‘Sweet Jesus’ and they saw the lamb’s eye and the truly innocent victim: themselves.’ (65) The marginalized community always forces its members to be identical – same thinking, same behavior – thereby creating a ghetto. Those who refuse to do so are outlawed. Like the black community in The Bluest Eye, Bottom community also sensors its own members for not confirming to its social standards. In The Bluest Eye, Bottom community internationalized the white standard of beauty and punished Pecola for being black. In Sula, the Bottom people insisted on the separateness of blacks from whites and the moral superiority of the former and punished Sula for her supposed crime of sleeping with a white man.

[I]t was the men who…said she was guilty of the unforgivable thing – the thing for which there was no understanding, no excuse, no compassion. The route from which there was no way back, the dirt that could not ever be washed away. They said that Sula slept with white man. It may not have been true, but it certainly could have been. She was obviously capable of it…Every one of them imagined the scene, each according to his own predilections – Sula underneath some white man – and it filled them with choking disgust. There was nothing lower she could do, nothing filthier. The fact that their own skin color was proof that it had happened in their own families was no deterrent to their file. Nor was the willingness of black men to lie in the beds of white women a consideration that might lead them towards tolerance. They insisted that all unions between white men and black women be rape; for a black woman to be willing was literally unthinkable. (112-3)

More than anything else, it was Sula’s ‘experimental’ life and her unpredictability (unlike Shadrack) that bothered Bottom people. Sula challenged all the accepted notions of thought and behavior. ‘She was completely free of ambition, with no affection for money, property or things, no greed, no desire to command attention or compliments – no ego. For that reason, she felt no compulsion to verify herself – be consistent with herself.’ (119) Because Bottom people could not guess the reason behind her actions, they watched her with suspicion. She was regarded as a deviant who had disregarded communal commitments. She had broken Nel’s marriage and rejected family when she forcibly institutionalized her grandmother Eva. The woman saw her as sexual threat and men considered her as racial traitor. Not able to understand her at all, they considered her as the incarnation of evil. She was totally isolated. The birthmark on her forehead was no longer seen as a rose, a symbol of passion but a snake, symbol of evil betrayal. Identifying Sula, as a personification of evil relieved them of the burden of their own evil and displaced it onto her. Once she was identified as a total evil she became necessary for Bottom as something like a moral standard, a limit marking off right from wrong.

Perceived as a generalized evil, Sula served to make other people appear relatively good. Teapot’s mamma, called this ‘because being his mother was precisely her major failure’ (113-114), suddenly becomes a devoted mother when she can blame Sula for hurting her son. When Teapot falls down, Teapot’s mama ‘told everybody that Sula had pushed him’ and then ‘immersed herself in a role she had shown no inclination for: motherhood. The very idea of a grown woman hurting her boy kept her teeth on edge. She became the most devoted mother: sober, clean and industrious’ (114). Once an ‘indifferent mother’, Teapot’s mamma becomes a good mother in order to be different from Sula. Sula becomes what Teapot’s mamma was formerly – ‘a grown woman hurting her boy’ – and Teapot’s mamma, displacing her own evil on to Sula, becomes perfectly good. The space of difference here is occupied by Sula who is used by others to realize and define the difference between good and evil.10 

Bottom people rationalized that ‘The presence of evil was something to be first recognized, then dealt with, survived, outwitted, triumphed over.’ (118) Accordingly, they ‘recognized’ Sula as evil, then ‘dealt with’ her not by obstructing her but by integrating her in the community as a center, a mass of negation. By becoming devoted spouses and caring parents, they thought that they could survive the evil influence of Sula. Indeed they did survive her because Sula took to bed and they were sure that they had outwitted her. When Sula died, they developed ‘a strong sense of hope’ (151) over their triumph. However, this triumph is short lived. Maggie Gale house says, ‘The anger and passion that Sula generated kept the Bottom up and running. In this way, Sula nurtured, even sexualized her community. Ironically, in the community’s collective hatred of her, Sula enforces the very roles they accused her of abusing: mother and lover. Her death renders the town socially impotent, as citizens are moved to undo the good that her alleged evil provoked.’11 As a result, what followed Sula’s death was not prosperity but self-destruction. First there were illness and ice, then dislocation, then indifference to each other (“Without her mockery, affection for others sank into flaccid disrepair” [153]) and finally death by water.

On the National Suicide Day (3rd January) of 1941, for the first time since it’s beginning, Shadrack was unwilling to go on his parade. His intention behind celebrating the National Suicide Day was to come to terms with death and its suddenness. But death of Sula made him doubt the usefulness of his actions. ‘He had said ‘always’ to convince her [Sula] assure her of permanency... [But] he had been wrong, terribly wrong. No ‘always’ at all. Another dying away of someone whose face he knew. It was then he began to suspect that all those years of rope hauling and bell ringing were never going to do any good.’ (157-8) On the other hand, death of Sula made Bottom people doubt the usefulness of life. For years, Bottom people had scorned Shadrack and his parade on National Suicide Day, shutting their doors, pulling down the shades and calling their children out of road. But on 3rd January 1941 they were happy to see Shadrack coming with his rope and bell. They were unafraid of death and their fearlessness made them laugh. By the time Shadrack reached the first house, he was facing a line of delighted faces... It frightened him, this glee, but he stuck to his habit – singing his song, ringing his bell and holding fast to his rope... Everybody, Dessie, Tar Baby, Patsy, Mr. Buckland Reed, Teapot’s Mamma, Valentine, the Deweys, Mrs. Jackson, Irene, the proprietor of the Palace of Cosmetology, Reba, the Herrod brothers and Hocks of teen-agers got into the mood of laughing, dancing, calling to one another, formed a pied piper’s band behind Shadrack.’ (159) For years Bottom people had hoped for a magic government which would alter their lot for good. Back in 1927, they had seen such chance in the form of building the river tunnel and road. But racism kept black people out of jobs and their dreams out of reality. Today (3rd January, 1941), they were feeling the same excitement, which they felt when the river work started in 1927. But it was of a different quality. When they reached the river site, they saw their promise leaf-dead. Excitement turned into rebellion and ‘Old and young, women and children, lame and hearty, they killed, as best they could, the tunnel they were forbidden to build.’ (161) Unfortunately, due to landslide, many of them got trapped inside the tunnel and met a tragic death.

Thus, the absence of positive role model of rebellion (like Sula) culminates merely into self-destructive frenzy. Sula’s death coincides with the destruction of Bottom and Morrison laments the fragmentation of a community into ‘separate houses with separate televisions and separate telephones.’ (166)

Eva Birch says, ‘In Sula, Morrison points to what can be lost when community disappears. Technological progress had brought isolation; a distancing of individuals from the emotion nutrition which had characterized the Bottoms, where once the air had ‘got heavy with peeled fruit and boiling vegetables. Fresh corn, tomatoes, string beans, melon rinds’. Morrison suggests that in striving to acquire he artifacts of twentieth-century America, black Americans will only survive ‘whole’ if they nourish and are in turn nourished by, their own community.’12 

Yet as Morrison reflects at the end of The Bluest Eye, ‘This soil is bad for certain kind of flowers. Certain seed it won’t nurture, certain fruits it won’t bear’ (The Bluest Eye: 164) and this is especially true about those black women who like Sula aspire to absolute freedom

Dr Manisha Patil 

महिला लेखन हेतु `साहित्य गरिमा पुरस्कार के लिए प्रविष्ठियाँ आमंत्रित

 महिला लेखन हेतु  `साहित्य गरिमा पुरस्कार  के लिए प्रविष्ठियाँ आमंत्रित 

====================

साहित्य गरिमा पुरस्कार दक्षिण प्रांतों के महिला लेखन को प्रोत्साहन एवं प्रतिष्ठित करने का व्यापक चिंतन है|  साहित्य की विविध विधाओं  की चयनित विधा पर महिला  लेखन को यह पुरस्कार देने का निर्णय  लिया  गया है | इस बार कहानी  और उपन्यास विधा पर यह पुरस्कार दो लेखिकाओं  को दिया जायेगा |  इस पुरस्कार के लिए इक्कीस हजार रुपए की धनराशि ,प्रशस्ति पत्र एवं स्मृति चिन्ह आदि एक भव्य समारोह में  दिया जाता है | 

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Sula : Marginalization

 Sula : Marginalization

Dr Manisha Patil 

In that place, where they tore the nightshade and blackberry patches from their roots to make room for the Medallion City Golf Course, there was once a neighborhood. (1)

I. Marginalization

The very first sentence of Sula introduces the reader to the black community, neighborhood (Bottom) and its brutal rooting out by white capitalism. In fact, all the problems of blacks – slavery, displacement, economic exploitation and racial discrimination – have their roots in white capitalism. There is ample evidence to prove that racism is a by-product of capitalism. Walter Rodney refutes the myth that racism was the initial cause of the enslavement of African people, by proving that Africans were enslaved ‘for economic reasons, so that their labor power could be exploited.’ In his words, ‘[After] having been utterly dependent on African labor, Europeans at home and abroad found it necessary to rationalize that exploitation in the racist terms as well. Oppression follows logically from exploitation so as to guarantee the latter.’1

The novel is structurally placed between two displacements – first when the blacks were deprived of the fertile valley land and second when they were evacuated from the bottom to make place for hilltop houses and golf club for the rich white folks. In between, the novel is punctuated with economic exploitation, racial discrimination and psychological trauma. Even the dates are significant – ‘1919’ signifying the end of World War I and ‘1941’ signifying the beginning of World War II frame the text. The books epilogue like last section, ‘1965’ coincides with the year that the United States began regular bombing raids on North Vietnam and was also the year of the well-known Southern California ‘race war’, the Watts Riots. Together all these incidents show that though slavery is abolished, white capitalism and resultant black marginalization are still order of the day. Slave trade displaced the Africans from their original home in Africa and began a long process of serial displacements that became the fate of millions of African Americans. Morrison foregrounds this fact by showing both building and demise of bottom in the very first few pages of the novel and especially through the Nigger joke, which focuses our attention on, how blacks have always faced injustice.

A good white farmer promised freedom and a piece of bottom land to his slave if he would perform some very difficult chores. When the slave completed the work, he asked the farmer to keep his end of the bargain. Freedom was easy – the farmer had no objection to that. But he didn’t want to give up any land. So he told the slave that he was very sorry that he had to give him the valley land. He had hoped to give him a piece of the bottom. The slave blinked and said he thought valley land was bottomland. The master said, “Oh no! See those hills? That’s bottom land, rich and fertile”.

“But it’s high up in the hills”, said the slave.

“High up from us”, said the master, “but when God looks down, it’s the bottom. That’s why we call it so. It’s the bottom of the heaven – best land is there”.

So the slave pressed his master to try to get him some. He preferred it to valley and it was done. The nigger got the hilly land, where planting was back breaking, where the soil slid down and washed away the seeds where the wind lingered all through winter. Which accounted for the fact that white people lived on the rich valley floor in that little river town in Ohio and blacks populated the hills above it, taking the small consolation in the fact that every day they could literally look down on the white folks. (5)

Susan Neal Mayberry comments, ‘Told from the Community’s perspective this joke is Morrison’s analogy for African American ‘signifying’ a rhetorical self-defense which protects the integrity of the black self through a clever inversion of the context in which (white) society defines value. African American children are trained in signifying rituals from an early age as a kind of verbal jujitsu, a black community watch. Like a Shakespearean fool, humorous, frequently prevented only by his or her wit from being insolent, the signifier is allowed license.’2

However, signifyin(g) does not change the material conditions, which are marked by poverty, hardships and violence – both physical and psychological. Eva Peace (Sula’s grandmother) serves as a representative example over here. She was left by her husband Boyboy without a penny and with three children to feed. She had no prospect of earning a decent living with her labor but her sheer will to survive was so great that she cut her one leg under the train to get insurance money from the railway to feed her children. However, her physical sacrifice is also accompanied with the psychological sacrifice. Her hardships made Eva not only tough but insensitive. She physically nourished her children but deprived them of the most essential thing in life – love. Years later in 1923, her daughter Hannah asked her, “Mamma, did you ever love us?” (67) Eva evaded the direct answer by repeating her hardships back in 1895, but failed to realize that it is their lovelessness, which made her children vulnerable and sent them to their premature deaths. Thus vulnerability and violence form a vicious circle. Gurleen Grewal comments, ‘Having sacrificed her life for the well-being of her children, Eva is compelled to burn her son and forced to watch her daughter Hannah burn.’3

America’s double standards are reflected in its war policy. Like the white farmer in the nigger joke, America calls upon its black men to ‘perform some very difficult chores’ but while giving the rewards, skillfully sidelines them. As a result, when America entered World War I, blacks were also involved in and destroyed by a European war from which they would not reap any benefit. Patricia Hunt writes, ‘Black men participated in US wars from the Revolution forward, in a military that remained segregated until after the Korean War. During World War I, nearly 400,000 black men were drafted, half of them serving in France. The black 369th Infantry were under continuous fire for a record of 191 days, for which they won the Croix de Guerre and the honor of leading the victorious Allied armies to the Rhine in 1918. The French had treated black soldiers as equals, but the American military authorities issued orders prohibiting them from conversing with or associating with French women attending social functions or visiting French homes.’4 Morrison’s Shadrack survived the ‘fire’ of the World War I battlefield, but in doing so lost his mind. Shadrack, the shell-shocked war veteran, was so much traumatized by the human carnage that when he looked at food, he only saw ‘the lumpy whiteness of rice, the quivering blood of tomatoes, the grayish brown meat’ (8). To contain his horror of unexpectedness of death or dying, Shadrach decreed a National Suicide Day, as an invitation to all who desire to commit murder or suicide. Plum Peace, another war veteran, who was a young and dynamic boy before the war, came back as a totally devastated and depressed man. Unable to pull himself together, he withdrew into the oblivion of drugs. When all the attempts to cheer him up or to bring him back to normalcy failed, finally Eva, his mother, set him on fire. She justified her action saying, “I did everything I could to make him leave me and go on and live and be a man but he wouldn’t and I had to keep him out so I just thought of a way he could die like a man, not all scrunched up inside my womb, but like a man”. (72)

Though blacks fought abroad as American citizens, at home, they still did not have full right to citizenship. America had equal but separate policy which is nothing but another form of institutionalized racism. Especially in South, this discrimination is more acute. John Callahan has written, ‘The heroism of black regiments is well-known, perhaps less well-known are the humiliations and terrors these soldiers faced back home, especially in the South.’ Black soldiers returning from World War I were reminded that they were no longer in France, that they would no longer be treated as equals. Mary Frances Berry and John Blassingame write that, ‘Returning black soldiers were insulted, stripped of their uniforms and beaten by white Russians and police.’ The years 1919 and 1920 saw extraordinarily violence against African Americans in the form of lynching and beatings of the scores lynched in 1919, many were veterans still in uniform.’5 Though the novel does not depict direct picture of lynching (it is out of the novel’s scope), the train episode throws a flash light on the treatment black men and women get in American South. Helen Wright (Nel’s mother) who had dignified manners and impressive personality was humiliated in the train, simply because of her custard color skin. There were separate compartments for blacks but no toilets for black women at all. By mistake, Helene boarded a white coach and was called ‘gal’ i.e. prostitute by the white ticket collector, which brought the smile of a street puppy on her face and hatred in the eyes of black soldiers and white passengers.

Like the street pup that wags its tail at the very doorjamb of the butcher shop he has been kicked away from only moments before, Helene smiled...The two black soldiers, who had been watching the scene with what appeared to be indifference, now looked stricken. Behind Nel was the bright and blazing light of her mother’s smile, before her the midnight eyes of the soldiers. She saw the muscles of their faces tighten under the skin from blood to marble. (21-2)

According to Susan Neal Mayberry, ‘the ‘po’ white’s’ unchecked disrespect of a ‘dictie’ black woman furiously strips the soldiers of any claim to the white upper-class knighthood they resent yet covet and simultaneously ashamed of her white damsel-in-distress behavior, they make no effort to be gallant to Helen even after the conductor’s disappearance. The ‘white m[a]n period’ has used Helen to emasculate the black soldiers and Helene has been reduced by both white and black men from a thoroughbred to ‘de mule of the world’. The animosity between the African American women and men in this situation is created not by gender conflicts but by complex issues of race and class.’6

In North, this institutionalized racism was more subtle but not less damaging. Especially when it came to money matters, blacks were deliberately discriminated against. Even though blacks were suited for better paying and respectable jobs, they were not hired.

Along with a few other young black men, Jude had gone down to the shack were they were hiring...Jude himself longed more than anybody to be taken. Not just for good money, more for the work itself. He wanted to swing the pick or kneel down with the sting or shovel the gravel. His arms ached for some-thing heavier than trays, for something dirtier than peelings; his feet wanted the heavy work shoes, not the thin-soled that the hotel required...”I built that road”, he could say... It was after he stood in lines for six days running and saw the gang boss pick out thin-armed white boys from the Virginia hills and the full-necked Greeks and Italians and heard over and over ‘Nothing else today. Come back tomorrow’ that he got the message. (81-82)

Thus, blacks were forced either to be unemployed or were underpaid so that they remained perpetually poor. The fate of black people in America has been always dependent on the policies and requirements of white Americans. During the slavery, black labor was forced to ‘perform some very difficult chores’ free of cost. But when after emancipation, black people expected to be paid at least decent wages (if not equal to white laborers doing the same job) for their sweat and blood, they were kept out of the work force altogether. In this way, the white capitalism reduced the black labor to the level of an object to be used and discarded whenever and wherever it wanted. Patricia Hunt rightly comments. ‘The fates of the Bottom-dwellers represent a political system which has enslaved a people, emancipated a people, enfranchised them, disenfranchised them, then simultaneously demanded their military service and denied them citizenship through civilian lives of poverty and terror.’7

Dr Manisha Patil