Tuesday, 13 June 2023

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 

Monday, 12 June 2023

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 

Sunday, 11 June 2023

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

जवाहरलाल नेहरू विश्वविद्यालय नई दिल्ली   

https://chat.whatsapp.com/GIdfcAHA4jD4w0LHU3vZu6

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 

Saturday, 10 June 2023

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 | 

बारहवाँ और  तेरहवाँ साहित्य गरिमा पुरस्कार वर्ष 2022 /2023  दक्षिण प्रांतों आंध्र प्रदेश ,तेलंगाना ,कर्नाटक  ,

महाराष्ट्र ,तमिलनाडु ,गुजरात ,

गोवा ,केरल ,लक्ष्यदीप एवं पांडुचेरी  आदि अहिन्दी भाषी प्रांतों  की  लेखिकाओं को  जिनकी पुस्तक उपरोक्त विधा कहानी पर  हिंदी में  वर्ष 2017 - 2022  के बीच प्रकाशित हुई हो एवं उपन्यास विधा पर हिंदी में वर्ष 2018 -2023  के बीच प्रकाशित हुई हो  ,वे इस पुरस्कार के लिए प्रविष्ठियों के रूप में   चार -चार पुस्तकें  ,जीवन परिचय  एवं नवीनतम दो  छाया चित्र और निजी पता लिखा व टिकट लगा लिफाफा सामग्री के साथ भिजवाएँ | पुस्तक कम से कम सौ पृष्ठों की होनी चाहिए |सामग्री के लिफाफे पर ``प्रविष्ठियाँ साहित्य गरिमा पुरस्कार -2022 /2023  '' साफ -साफ बड़े अक्षरों में लिखें |  प्रविष्ठियाँ भेजने की अंतिम तिथि 31 अगस्त -2023 होगी | कोविड महामारी के कारण वर्ष 2020 और वर्ष - 2021  का साहित्य गरिमा पुरस्कार निरस्त कर दिया गया है | अन्य हिंदी प्रदेशों के रचनाकार जो विगत दस वर्ष से दक्षिण प्रदेशों  में  रह रहें हैं, वे इस पुरस्कार हेतु  प्रविष्ठि भेज सकते हैं | अधिक जानकारी हेतु डॉ अहिल्या मिश्र -9849742803 / 7981640328 या डॉ. रमा द्विवेदी -9849021742 से संपर्क करें | 

प्रविष्ठियाँ भेजने का पता -

 डॉ अहिल्या  मिश्र ,संस्थापक अध्यक्ष , 

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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 

Friday, 9 June 2023

Resistance

 Resistance

Dr Manisha Patil 

Although Pecola is doomed right from the beginning and there is no redemption for her at the end; although the novel is tragic in structure, it is far from pessimistic in essence. Deep beneath all the grief and sorrow for Pecola lays a strong sense of hope in the form of Claudia, the narrator. In fact, in accordance with the text and counter-text narrative structure of the novel, Claudia emerges as a foil to Pecola. If the main cause of Pecola’s downfall is her loveless life than the main cause of Claudia’s survival is ‘love, thick and dark as Alaga syrup.’ (7) Mrs. MacTeer often speaks harshly to her daughters but beneath these harsh words lie her caring and will to protect her children from all harm and danger. In sharp contrast to Polly who is more concerned with her messed up floor than the burns of her daughter, Mrs. MacTeer is angry with whatever messes up with her children. When Claudia is sick, her mother nurses her on one hand and expresses her rage at Claudia’s sickness at other. Claudia says, “My mother’s voice drones on. She is not talking to me. She is talking to the puke but she is calling it my name: Claudia…My mother’s anger humiliates me; her words chafe my cheeks and I am crying. I do not know that she is not angry at me but at my sickness…in the night when my coughing is dry and tough, feet padded into the room, hands repined the flannel, readjusted the quilt and rested a moment on my forehead. So, when I think of autumn, I think of somebody with hands who does not want me to die.” (7) Mrs. MacTeer extends this maternal love to a foster girl like Pecola as well. When Pecola drinks three quarts of milk, obviously Mrs. MacTeer is angry. However, again she is not angry at Pecola’s drinking milk but at her shortage of enough milk. But when Pecola starts menstruating, she draws Pecola near her as her own daughter (‘Then she pulled both of them toward her, their heads against her stomach. Her eyes were sorry.’ [22]) and the music of her laughter drowned her anger.

Mr. MacTeer too is a foil to Cholly. Though his appearance is very short in the novel and it is overshadowed by the presence of his wife Mrs. MacTeer, one short scene is enough to prove his stature as the Vulcan guarding the flames of the home fires. When their roomer Mr. Henry tries to molest Frieda, Mr. MacTeer (Daddy) ‘threw our old tricycle at his head and knocked him off the porch…Daddy was cussing and everybody was screaming…and Mr. Buford came running out with his gun and Mama told him to go somewhere and sit down and Daddy said no and give him the gun and Mr. Buford did and Mama screamed and Mr. Henry shut up and started running and Daddy shot at him and Mr. Henry jumped out of his shoes and kept on running in his socks.’ (77)

Absorbed by the white consumerism, Pecola assumes that love is proportional to one’s beauty and richness. The equation goes – if you are white and beautiful, then you are rich and then worthy of others’ love. Polly’s rejection of Pecola for the blonde Fisher girl is responsible for this wrong assumption. However, for Claudia this equation does not hold true. For her love has nothing to do with money. She dislikes the expensive white doll gifts given to her on Christmas. Adults consider them to be the best gift for any girl child. ‘Adults, older girls, shops, magazines, newspapers, window signs – all the world agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow haired, pink-skinned doll was what every girl child treasured. “Here,” they said, “this is beautiful and if you are on this day ‘worthy’ you may have it.”‘ (14) However, Claudia is not flattered by those dolls. On the other hand, she dismembers the white baby dolls: ‘To see of what it was made, to discover the dearness, to find the beauty, the desirability that had escaped me, but apparently only me.’(14) She gives more importance to an experience of emotional security than any material gift however expensive it might be. She says, ‘I did know that nobody ever asked me what I wanted for Christmas. Had any adult with the power to fulfill my desires taken me seriously and asked me what I wanted, they would have known that I did not want to have anything to own or to possess any object. I wanted rather to feel something on Christmas day. The real question would have been, “Dear Claudia, what experience you would like on Christmas?” I could have spoken up. “I want to sit on the low stool in Big Mama’s kitchen with my lap full of lilacs and listen to Big Papa play his violin for me alone.” The lowness of stool made for my body, the security and warmth of Big Mama’s kitchen, the smell of lilacs, the sound of the music and since it would be good to have all of senses engaged, the taste of a peach, perhaps, afterwards’ (14-5)

In sharp contrast to Pecola who ‘hears Poland singing, and she listens to China signifying on Marie’s story, but she lacks the cultural knowledge necessary to understanding; [who] is exiled from the collective consciousness; it is as though she doesn’t speak the language of the blues, although she most certainly lives the blues.’29 Claudia has developed ‘a sharp-edged humor’ an ‘adaptive laughing-to-keep-from-crying perspective’ characteristic of the signifying game. ‘When Mr. Henry molests Frieda and Frieda explains to Claudia the nature of his transgression, Claudia attempts to insert her voice into this tradition, and Morrison emphasizes the humor and naïveté in the guileless child’s attempt. Claudia enthusiastically asks, “‘Really? How did it feel?’” (99). She then asks if it didn’t feel good, and displays an innocent jealousy at Mr. Henry’s choosing Frieda instead of her, aligning herself with the blues singer who complains of an empty bed.’30

Claudia is a part of larger African American community, so she is privy to the community’s secrets and gossips like Soaphead’s dirty habits towards small girls. This informal knowledge protects her from many mishaps which befall Pecola and against which she does not have any safeguards. As Claudia herself puts it, ‘There is a difference between putout and being put outdoors. If you are put out you go somewhere else; if you are outdoors, there is no place to go.’(11) Her membership of the larger African American community also develops two most important survival strategies in Claudia (which again Pecola lacks) – namely blues and signifying. Her mother Mrs. MacTeer is her guide in blues. According to Cat Moses, Mrs. MacTeer’s blues singing ‘forms a bridge between childhood (the milk consumption represents Pecola’s effort to consume – and become – Shirley Temple) and womanhood. The blues to which Claudia refers exemplify the cultural knowledge and values transmitted orally to Claudia that ease and assist her transition into womanhood – folk wisdom that is not conveyed to Pecola. The blues are first represented in the text in Claudia’s reminiscence about the Saturdays when her “mother was in a singing mood.” Claudia recalls snatches of lyrics from “hard times” songs her mother frequently sings…lyrics [which] convey a wealth of folk knowledge and cultural values. Hearing her mother sing the blues, Claudia finds herself longing for those hard times, yearning to be grown without “a thin di-ime to my name.” I looked forward to the delicious time when “my man” would leave me, when I would “hate to see that evening sun go down...” cause then I would know “my man has left this town.” Misery colored by the greens and blues in my mother’s voice took all the grief out of the words and left me with a conviction that pain was not only endurable, it was sweet.’31

Talking further about the blues songs which are referred in the novel, Cat Moses says, ‘The speaking subject of the “St. Louis Blues” constructs a striking visual image of the desired man as “Blacker than midnight, teeth lak flags of truce/Blackest man in de whole St. Louis.” She then employs this image in a direct inversion of the dominant caste hierarchy, closing the verse with a popular aphorism, passed down through generations of African Americans, that assigns the highest aesthetic value to the darkest skin: “Blacker de berry, sweeter is de juice....” While Claudia is regularly serenaded – on Saturdays, when her mother was in a singing mood – with this concise, confident, and lyrical deconstruction of the Shirley Temple aesthetic, Pecola is rejected by Pauline, who embraces the “corn-yellow”-haired child of her white employers…Claudia’s defiance of and Pecola’s internalization of the Shirley Temple aesthetic are illustrated in the Maureen Peal “six-finger-dog-tooth-meringue-pie” episode (61-73). In rejecting Maureen and “calling her out of her name,” Claudia rejects the intra-racism implicit in the privileging of Maureen’s “high yellow dream” complexion and her “two lynch ropes” of long brown hair (62). Pecola desires what Claudia rejects: light skin, straight hair, blue eyes, and the social status they represent. Claudia’s defiance is a learned and nurtured defiance, encouraged by a severe but loving mother who sings to her on Saturdays. Pecola internalizes the caste aesthetic that the “St. Louis Blues” mediates against, an aesthetic that Morrison argues has insidiously infiltrated not only families like the Breedloves but whole communities.’32

As mentioned earlier, African American community’s internalization of white aesthetics is reflected in their reaction to the white dolls. When Claudia dismembered those dolls, ‘Grown people frowned and fussed: “you-don’t-know-how-to-take-care-of-nothing. I-never-had-a-baby-doll-in-my-whole-life-and-used-to-cry-my-eyes-out-for-them. Now-you-got-one-a-beautiful-one-and-you-tear-it-up-what’s-the-matter-with-you?”‘ (14) In contrast to this mythic love for white dolls, they displayed utter indifference, worse still disgust and scorn for Pecola and her unborn child. Claudia recalls,

They were disgusted, amused, shocked, outraged or even excited by the story. But we listened for the one who would say, “Poor little girl” or “Poor baby”, but there was only head-wagging where these words should have been. We looked for eyes creased with concern but saw only veils.

I thought about the baby that everybody wanted dead and saw it very clearly. It was in a dark wet place, its head covered with great O’s of wool, the black face holding, like nickels, two clean black eyes, the flared nose, kissing-thick lips, and the living, breathing silk of black skin. No synthetic yellow bangs suspended over marble-blue eyes, no pinched nose and bowline mouth. More strongly than my fondness for Pecola, I felt a need for someone to want the black baby to live – just to counteract the universal love of white baby dolls, Shirley Temples and Maureen Peals. (149)

Because nobody else would pray for Pecola and her child’s safety, Claudia and Frieda take on this responsibility. Like innumerable fairy-tale heroines like Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty, like Christianity’s ultimate faith in ‘belief’ and like Pecola’s magical gain of blue eyes, Claudia and Frieda believe that by planting the marigolds correctly they can influence Pecola’s fate. When they fail, they blame themselves for not performing the rites correctly, for not having the right amount of belief. But adult Claudia, with her realistic judgment, realizes the futility of such magic solutions. She recognizes that measuring one’s world with black-and-white scales and trying to find easy solutions to the drudgery of daily life can cause a person to lose his/her grounding not only in one’s heritage but also in reality. Ultimately, the price such a person pays is the loss of one’s self. So while Pecola completely steps over in the world of fantasy, Claudia returns back to the world of reality, to its hard problems and lack of easy solutions. But at the same time she also realizes the importance of telling Pecola’s story, testifying it: ‘To testify is thus not merely to narrate but to commit oneself, and to commit the narrative, to others: to take responsibility – in speech – for history or for the truth of an occurrence, for something which, by definition, goes beyond the personal, in having general (non-personal) validity and consequences.’33 By telling Pecola’s story, Claudia takes on the responsibility of finding realistic solutions to the problems. The situation cannot be changed either by an individual or by magic. What is needed is collective efforts and political action. Laurie Vickroy writes, ‘In a world where the social, racial and political exercise of power creates destruction of the human psyche so that it cannot oppose domination, Morrison’s emphatic message is that the traumatized responses of individuals must not be relegated to the domestic sphere but should instead be seen as a clear signal that destructive forces are at work. For Morrison, the act of narration can be one means in the process of collecting and sharing knowledge heretofore held by “discredited people,” a means of resisting the urge to see collective victimization only as individualized (“Memory” 388; Davis Interview 146).’34

Cat Moses radically claims that Claudia is ‘the narrative’s blues subject, its bluest “I” and representative blues figure, and Pecola [is] the abject tabula rasa on which the community’s blues are inscribed…[R]ather than singing Pecola’s blues, Claudia “sings” the community’s blues. Claudia bears witness, through the oral tradition of testifying, to the community’s lack of self-love and its transference of this lack onto the abject body of Pecola.’ She also states that like a traditional blues lyric, The Bluest Eye moves ‘from an initial emphasis on loss to a concluding suggestion of resolution of grief through motion.’ Her views are worth quoting at length.

Morrison constructs Claudia as a blues subject: sensuous, brutally honest, poetic, ironically humorous, and adept at call-and-response, signifying, and testifying. She learns to sing from her mother, and her blues is The Bluest Eye...Blues narratives, like blues lyrics, never end on a closed note, and The Bluest Eye is no exception. At the end of a “typical” blues there is affirmation, as there is in “St. Louis Blues” (of the beauty in blackness), and there is movement, or a statement of intent to move, but there is no closure, no neatly wrapped-up ending…the construction of ironic distance [of blues subject from loss] and open-endedness is a primary function of the blues, which codify a means of resistance to oppression and a call to “move on” up and out. Claudia’s blues narrative may be understood as a sustained signifying on the master aesthetic of physical beauty and the racial self-loathing that this master aesthetic produces. Hers is a complex and polyvocal signifying, involving a call-and-response dialectic with her community…Claudia’s narrative traces a trajectory from the childhood experience and naming of lack – her community’s lack of a sense of the intrinsic beauty of blackness and hence its scapegoating of the Breedloves and of Pecola, in particular – to a sense of resolution through movement.

At the novel’s close, Claudia...has stood at a blues crossroads and resolved to assert her independence. She has distanced herself from Pecola and from her community in order to engage the community in a dialectic…The Bluest Eye is her testifying to Pecola’s pain and the community’s shame.35

In Representation, Race and the Language of the Ineffable in Toni Morrison’s Narrative, Abdellatif Khayati states that, ‘In the social world that this novel depicts the cultural values of American consumer industry are totalized to a degree that what we are left with are various ways in which the distortion and denial of the black self are produced. As a result of this, The Bluest Eye is built upon a dualistic perspective of the ‘dominant’ versus ‘dominated’, leaving little space for resistance.’36

However, this extreme view neglects the basic dialectical – text and counter-text – structure of the novel. Donald Gibson in his essay, Text and Counter-text in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye says, ‘the novel argues with itself, clarifying rather than simplifying, uncovering and grappling with the most problematic facets of the subject and undercutting easily held values in order to reveal complication. The novel’s text is inscribed with a counter-text, an oppositional discourse so intricately intertwined with text as to render it finally incapable of independent existence, transforming each by turn into the counter of the other. While text and counter-text contend for dominance, the one melds into the opposite and at midpoint between the exchange neither is independently discernible though both are present, like an optical illusion which may alternately assume one form then, another, then perhaps varying degrees of both and neither depending upon the disposition of the observer’s eye and mind.’37

The primer text provides the white hegemonic framework to the novel and to the characters in the novel and also reveals the role of education in the colonization of mind. ‘One cannot simply learn to read without being subjugated to the values engraved in the text.’ [Gibson: 161] But by gradually removing the punctuation and spacing from the primer text and thereby making it illegible, Morrison turns itself into a counter-text. When the reader tries to read the third version, s/he is forced to participate more actively in the process of reading, identifying, misinterpreting, correcting and then reinterpreting the text. Though s/he initially tries to stick to the first neat and clean version, s/he soon realizes that such an effort is futile. In reading the third version, s/he re-reads the first version as well and becomes the ‘resistant reader’ (Judith Fetterley’s term), the one who resists the hegemonic intentions and designs in order by a ‘revisionary re-reading’ to bring to light and to counter the covert sexual and racial biases written into a literary work.

Morrison’s use of primer text to introduce her novel also re/visions the tradition of authentication. Historically, the slave narratives were prefaced by the white writers stating that the black writer’s experiences, views and opinions though strange are none-the-less not only authentic but are also up to the mark of white audience level. So, the book should not be dismissed beforehand (because the author is black) but should be given a fair and sympathetic hearing by ignoring its crudeness of experience and lack of elegant style. This condescending attitude on one hand gave a black write a license to publication but on the other hand re-inscribed his/her inferiority to the white masters. But when in The Bluest Eye, Morrison herself introduces her text with the white primer she, in fact, ‘seizes the authority of the authenticator by appropriating and subverting the role of authenticator’ [Gibson: 161] in other words, Morrison asserts her own authority and authenticity of black experience in the very act of subjugating that experience to white framework. Gibson writes, ‘The implication of the novel’s structure is that our lives are contained within the framework of the dominant culture and subjected to those values. We have all (there is reason to believe the author does not exclude herself nor anyone else) internalized those values and to the extent that we have, we are instruments of our own oppression. The text says we are oppressed by the values of the ruling class; the counter-text says we participate in our own oppression usually to the extent of being the very hand or arm of that oppression.’38

 So, by further implication it means that to stop our oppression, we should stop our subordination to the dominant culture and to its values. The way to do so is to tell our own stories in our own way. At one place, Morrison commented, ‘I wrote Sula and The Bluest Eye because they were books I had wanted to read. No one had written them yet, so I wrote them.’39 As a student, she had read Faulkner, Virginia Woolf and Ralph Ellison. But from these literary works, she found herself, a small black girl from rural Ohio, curiously absent. Even when the story is about a black girl (e.g. Trueblood episode in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man), it is not only narrated but also commented upon solely through a male consciousness with a white cultural bias. When Trueblood rapes his own daughter Matty Lou, he is shown to have a reverie in which he dreams having sexual intercourse with a white woman. In Black Skin, White Mask, Franz Fanon states that, ‘for a black man there is only one destiny and it is white.’ To attain that destiny, black man desires the love of a white woman: ‘Out of the blackest part of my soul, across the zebra striping of my mind surges this desire to be suddenly white. I wish to be acknowledged not as black but as white. Now…who but a white woman can do this for me? By loving me, she proves that I am worthy of white love. I am loved like a white man. I am white man. Her love takes me onto the noble road that leads to total realization… I marry white culture, white beauty, white whiteness. When my restless hands caress those white breasts, they grasp white civilization and dignity and make them mine.’40 In this process a black woman is reduced to a passive and negative object on which only fears and frustrations of both white supremist and subjugated black cultures are projected. Matty Lou becomes a substitute for a white woman whom Trueblood cannot attain due to social restrains because the intercourse between a black man and a white woman is considered to be a violation of racial code by the dominant ideology. Trueblood can only dream to possess a white woman sexually but he can actually violate the moral code by raping his own daughter without any fear or shame. He even justifies his action by urging the people to distinguish between ‘blood-sin’ and ‘dream-sin’. His horrified wife can neither punish him nor undo the harm done to her daughter because she lacks the material resources to do so. When the black school administrators wish to remove him from the community for his shamefully repugnant act, white males come to his rescue. Those who would have lynched him, if he would have dared to touch a white woman, let alone raping her, the same people (white males) provide him with all the material goods because they want to hold him up as an example of black barbarism. In this whole episode, Matty Lou is curiously both absent and silent object. When Morrison rewrites this incest plot in The Bluest Eye, she brings Pecola center stage. For the world, even Pecola is both absent and silent. But for the readers, her absent presence and silent communication (her hallucination) become larger than life. In Invisible Man, Trueblood says, “Except that my wife an’ daughter won’t speak to me, I’m better off than I ever been before.” He also rationalizes that ‘Matty Lou won’t look at me and won’t speak a word to anybody’ is that she is ashamed of being pregnant. In The Bluest Eye, Morrison tells us the meaning of this reaction of the rape victim: complete breakdown of psyche. Morrison strips off the ‘male glamour of shame’ given to Trueblood by Ellison and instead shows the father-daughter incest as the most devastating loss to both an individual and the entire community. Michael Awkward rightly comments,

Morrison, finally, seems to be taking Ellison to task for the phallocentric nature of his representation of incest which marginalizes and renders as irrelevant the consequences of the act for the female victim. The Bluest Eye serves as a revisionary reading of the Trueblood episode of Invisible Man. Morrison writes her way into the Afro-American literary tradition by foregrounding the effects of incest for female victims in direct response to Ellison’s refusal to consider them seriously. And so while the victims of incest in both novels ultimately occupy similarly silent, asocial positions in their respective communities, Morrison explicitly details Pecola’s tragic and painful journey while Ellison in confining Matty Lou to the periphery suggests that her perspective contains for him ‘no compelling significance.’41

As a black woman writer, Morrison selects those stories which perhaps have ‘no compelling significance’ for the dominant white male world but which address the life-and-death questions of black women. Echoing Claudia’s words, ‘Nobody paid us any attention, so we paid very good attention to ourselves.’ (150) black women writers have created the whole new cannon of literature which is not about pleasure but about survival. Alice Walker has said, “It is, in the end, the saving of lives that we writers are about…we do it because we care…we care because we know this: the lives we save is our own.”42 Through The Bluest Eye and her other subsequent novels, Morrison does exactly this: she cares and makes her readers care for her characters and thereby saves all of them from the ‘disinterested violence’ of capitalism which in long run affects all people irrespective of their race, sex and place. Morrison’s ultimate aim is to build human solidarity across the lines of race, sex, class and place which in long run would replace the divisions created by capitalism and bring about total human freedom. In the meanwhile, in Sula, she places race and sex, individual and community, rootedness and displacement side by side and posits solidarity among women irrespective of their differences as a means of achieving freedom for black women.

Dr Manisha Patil 

Thursday, 8 June 2023

Pecola

 Pecola 

Dr Manisha Patil 

Long hours she sat looking in the mirror, trying to discover the secret of the ugliness, the ugliness that made her ignored or despised at school, by teachers and classmates alike. (34)

In the hierarchy of power, if white man is at the top, the black girl is at the bottom. In the world of novel, Pecola is the ultimate other. Neglected by the parents, harassed by the black boys and marginalized by the whole community, she tries to find its reason in her ugliness, in her blackness. Her irony here is that the secret is not going to be found within herself but within the culture that defines her ugly. However, unlike Claudia (the narrator), Pecola has unquestioningly accepted the white hegemony and so according to her, the solution to her problem is to acquire blue eyes – the magic key to beauty, love and happiness. The result of this desire is the tragic schizophrenia which totally damages her psyche.

In The Bluest Eye, Morrison placed Pecola in an extreme situation rather than a representative one. Pecola’s case is unique for unlike Claudia, Frieda and other black children she is not loved by her parents. In fact, her mother Polly considers her ugly and therefore unworthy of love. Her father Cholly, himself unloved does not know how to love his daughter. Moreover, lack of supporting keen make Pecola alienated from larger African American community and deprived her of African American survival strategies – namely blues and signifying – which subtly subvert white hegemony and uphold African American racial pride. A blues song which originates in ‘an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger it’s jagged grain and to transcend it not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism’20 expresses a sweetness of pain which deconstructs black and white binary opposition between happiness (associated with whiteness and all joy) and sorrow (associated with blackness and irrevocable sadness). Similarly, the game of signifying, ‘a rhetorical self-defense which protects the integrity of the black slave through a clever inversion of the context in which (white) society defines value’21 provides a strong antidote to white hegemonic discourse which vilifies blackness. Unfortunately Pecola’s ignorance of blues and signifying make her totally vulnerable to the ‘epistemic violence’ (Gayatri Spivak’s term for the western European colonial production of knowledge that justified and consolidated colonial domination while creating and subjecting its ‘other’ via that knowledge.)22 of Primer, Mary Jane and Shirley Temple.

Gurleen Grewal gives us the etymology of the word ‘primer’. Its obvious meaning is ‘an elementary book for teaching children to read’. But it also means ‘a person or thing that primes’, the verb prime being defined as ‘to prepare or make ready for a particular purpose or operation’.23 Thus Dick-and-Jane Primer prepares children – both black and white – to accept the fictional world of Primer as true. The primer presents a standardized white American nuclear family, rich and affluent, beautiful and happy. It suggests that with whiteness, one is guaranteed beauty, morality, success and happiness. Thus the primer also teaches its young readers to unquestioningly accept the myth of white superiority. The subject matter of primer is also repeated in other forms like advertisement. Jane in the primer becomes Mary Jane on the candy rapper and Shirley Temple on the milk cups. The smiling white face of a small girl with blond hair and blue eyes makes people look at her with awful love and brings honey in their voices. In contrast, people avoid looking at Pecola, to speak to her and to touch her. In her class, she alone sits at a double desk. Teachers try ‘never to glance at her…and all her classmates make fan of her.’ (34)

If blacks try to turn a blind eye to Pecola, to the whites she is already invisible. e.g. when she goes to Mr. Yacoboshi’s (a white Jew’s) shop to buy candies. 

He dose not see her, because for him there is nothing to see…She looks up at him and sees the vacuum where curiosity ought to lodge. And something more. The total absence of human recognition--the glazed separateness. She does not know what keeps his glance suspended. Perhaps because he is grown, or a man, and she a little girl. But she has seen interest, disgust, even anger in grown male eyes. Yet this vacuum is not new to her. It has an edge; somewhere in the bottom lid is the distaste. She has seen it lurking in the eyes of all white people. So. The distaste must be for her, her blackness. All things in her are flux and anticipation. But her blackness is static and dread. And it is the blackness that accounts for, that creates, the vacuum edged with distaste in white eyes. (36-7)

Jane Kuenz writes, ‘When others Mr. Yacoboshi, her teachers etc – cannot or will not see her, then she ceases to be seen at all or sees herself in the iconographic images she can attain only in madness.’24 The primer focuses on Jane and her wish to play. But Pecola’s experience shows her that for other people, she and her wishes are always out of focus. She is not important enough to pay any attention. Eva Lennox Birch writes, ‘The opening extract from the primer, clearly punctuated, makes sense, but as the story progresses, the punctuation disappears and sounds like a child who reads words without understanding, until finally there is a chaos of individual letters making no sense at all. Reading is a sophisticated use of the eyes. It is the end result of an intellectual translation physical reality into a system of signs. The “naming” process involved in this exercise help children to make sense of external world. This process assumes, however, that the writer and the reader share the same sense of “reality”. What Pecola “reads” in her life bears no relation to what white society and the education process teaches her as being normal. What Pecola “reads” does not equate with her “reality” – what she “sees” is at variance with what she reads. But instead of questioning what is seen, she questions her means of seeing. Eyes and ways of seeing dominate the novel. With blue eyes, Pecola thinks, she would see – and be seen – differently.’25

As mentioned earlier, it is Pecola’s alienation from larger African American community that keeps her ignorant about African American double consciousness, which serves blacks as a self-protective mask. Blacks are simultaneous members of two opposing groups – first the dominant white America and second marginalized blacks America. Though they are looked upon by other people as the members of second group, they themselves take up the position as the members of first group when they look at others. In other words, they internalize alien white gaze and in the process fragment their psyche in two parts – their one part becomes observer/oppressor while the other becomes observed/oppressed. Then they turn their gaze outward, become the observer/oppressor of other people and thereby protect themselves from being observed/ oppressed. They project their feeling of guilt and shame for being black on an external object and thereby assume the subjectivity of being white. Pecola on the other hand, turns her gaze inward and becomes the observed /oppressed. She does not look back in anger and reflect the objectifying gaze back on others. This deprives her of subjectivity – the very thing she is in search of all the time and which she feels she will get only if she gets blue eyes. Instead of changing the gaze, she is bent on changing the eyes. The difference in the perspectives of Pecola and larger African American community makes Pecola a perfect scapegoat onto whom the community can project all its shadow and then ritually sacrifice her to feel the purgation. Pecola’s victimization by a group of black boys makes this point clear.

A group of boys was circling and holding at bay a victim, Pecola Breedlove…Heady with the smell of their own musk, thrilled by the easy power of a majority, they gaily harassed her. 

“Black e mo. Black e mo. Yadaddsleepsnekked. Black e mo black e mo ya dadd sleeps nekked. Black e mo . . .”

They had extemporized a verse made up of two insults about matters over which the victim had no control; the color of her skin and speculations on the sleeping habits of an adult, wildly fitting in its incoherence. That they themselves were black, or that their own father had similarly relaxed habits was irrelevant…Pecola edged around the circle crying. She had dropped her notebook, and covered her eyes with her hands. (50) 

By punishing Pecola for the crime of being black, they try to externuate and devisualize their own blackness. The fact that Pecola accepts her role as a scapegoat is evident from her reaction to dandelions. When she goes to Mr Yacoboski’s shop, she passes a patch of dandelions ‘why, she wonders do people call them weeds? She thought they were pretty.’ (35) Yet her soft, glimmering joy of watching dandelions is brutally devastated by the vacuous, distasteful and shame inducing stare of Mr. Yacoboski when she returns from the shop with nine Mary Jane candies and again passes by the dandelions, she again thinks, ‘They are ugly. They are weeds.’ (37) According to Michael Awkward,

In her [Claudia’s] own view as well as in that of the omniscient narrator, Pecola’s appearance is not what distinguishes her from her black peers. Rather, she is held up as a figure of supreme ridicule strictly because, in her detachment from her cultural heritage, she exists unprotected from the disastrous effects of standards that she cannot achieve. She has not properly learned the rules of black (urban) life, or, rather, she has learned them too well. While other blacks pay nominal homage to the gods who created the standards by which America measures beauty and worth, and appear[,] as a consequence, to have “collected self-hatred by the heap,” they actually maintain strong feelings of self-worth. They hide these feelings from gods who are interested only in surface – and not spiritual – devotion…The community’s worship at the altar of white beauty is only gesture, only acts “smoothly cultivated” to fool the master, to appease the gods. Because Pecola never learns of the potential benefits of masking and self-division in a white dominated America, she represents a perfect target of scorn for the blacks who are armed with this knowledge. These Afro-Americans, in fact, use Pecola as ritual object in their ceremonies designed to exhibit to the master their, “rejection” of blackness.26

Pecola is scapegoated at various levels and by diverse people. Geraldine’s son uses her to kill Geraldine’s cat and Soaphead uses her to kill his landlady’s hateful dog. However the extremity of her helpless condition is underlined by her parents’ harsh treatment of her. The severity of Polly’s behavior is reflected in a scene in which Polly slaps Pecola very hard for accidentally spilling a blueberry pie onto the newly cleaned floor of Fisher’s kitchen. Then ignoring her burns and cries of pain, Polly further abuses Pecola, throws her out of house and proceeds to embrace tenderly the white Fisher child with a voice full of honey. Polly even disowns her relationship with Pecola when she refuses to tell Fisher girl, “who were they?” Claudia is bewildered by the fact that white Fisher girl calls her ‘Polly’ while Pecola calls her mother ‘Mrs. Breedlove’ who is more concerned with the condition of her floor than the welfare of her daughter. The only other scene which outweighs this one in severity is Cholly’s rape of Pecola; however it is described in Morrison’s characteristic ironic language.

The tenderness welled up in him, and he sank to his knees, his eyes on the foot of his daughter. Crawling on all fours toward her, he raised his hand and caught the foot in an upward stroke. Pecola lost her balance and was about to careen to the floor. Cholly raised his other hand to her hips to save her from falling. He put his head down and nibbled at the back of her leg. His mouth trembled at the firm sweetness of the flesh. He closed his eyes, letting his fingers dig into her waist. The rigidness of her shocked body, the silence of her stunned throat, was better than Pauline’s easy laughter had been. The confused mixture of his memories of Pauline and the doing of a wild and forbidden thing excited him, and a bolt of desire ran down his genitals, giving it length, and softening the lips of his anus. Surrounding all of this list was a border of politeness. He wanted to fuck her – tenderly. But the tenderness would not hold. The tightness of her vagina was more than he could bear. His soul seemed to slip down to his guts and fly out into her, and the gigantic thrust he made into her then provoked the only sound she made – a hollow suck of air in the back of her throat. Like the rapid loss of air from a circus balloon. (128)

Commenting on it Donald Gibson says, ‘Pecola is an inverted virgin Mary....a virgin Mary demystified: not mysteriously and spiritually impregnated by god, the father, but brutally impregnated by Cholly Breedlove, the father, on the dirty floor of the kitchen of her storefront home. The offspring of this union is the Christ child, the stillborn Christ child who is incapable of saving the world because incapable of saving himself.’27 

Ultimately Pecola herself becomes the Christ figure when she takes on the sins of the world around her and absolves others of their guilt: ‘All of our waste which we dumped on her and which she absorbed. And all of our beauty, which was hers first and which she gave to us. All of us – all who knew her – felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health, her awkwardness made us think we had a sense of humor. Her inarticulateness made us believe we were eloquent. Her poverty kept us generous. Even her waking dreams we used – to silence our own nightmares. And she let us, and thereby our contempt. We honed our egos on her, padded our characters with her frailty, and yawned in the fantasy of our strength.’ (163)

However, unlike Christ, there is no resurrection for Pecola. The path she takes leads not to salvation but to madness. In her fantasy of having gained blue eyes and in her need to confirm this fact (?), Pecola starts hallucinating a friend who can see her blue eyes and be envious of them. In this process, she has turned her gaze totally inward crating an imaginary ‘self’ (a blue-eyed Pecola) as subject and objectifying the real black-eyed Pecola even further by turning her into other. Unlike the double consciousness of African American community (which retains the awareness of truth) Pecola’s inverted consciousness breaks down all the boundaries marking the space between inside and outside, self and other, sense and nonsense. Blue-eyed Pecola feels that she is stopped from going to school because everybody is jealous of her blue eyes. Her own envy of Maureen’s beauty and popularity, she turns into indifference. When the black-eyed Pecola pricks her about Cholly and his behavior, she violently denies the rape on one hand and tries to recollect her feelings about it on the other.

How could somebody make you do something like that?

Easy.

Oh, Yeah? How easy?

They just make you, that’s all.

I guess you’re right. And cholly could make anybody do anything.

He could not.

He made you, didn’t he?

Shut up!

I was only teasing.

Shut up! […]

Well, I’m glad you didn’t let him.

Yes.

Did you?

Did I what?

Let him.

Now who’s crazy?

I am, I guess.

You sure are.

Still . . .

Well. Go ahead. Still what?

I wonder what it would be like.

Horrible.

Really?

Yes. Horrible.

Then why didn’t you tell Mrs. Breedlove?...

You don’t understand anything, do you? She didn’t even believe me when I told her.

So that’s why you didn’t tell her about the second time?

She wouldn’t have believed me then either.

You’re right. No use telling her when she wouldn’t believe you […]

I don’t like to talk about dirty things.

Me neither. Let’s talk about something else.

What? What will we talk about?

Why, your eyes.

Oh, yes. My eyes. My blue eyes. Let me look again.

See how pretty they are. 

Yes. They get prettier each time I look at them. (157-159)

Finally, their conversation again turns to the one and only beautiful and joyous thing in their life – the blue eyes. The blue-eyed Pecola desires to know whether her eyes are the bluest of not and is anxious of their not being so. The black-eyed Pecola assures her that only she has the bluest eye/I in the whole would and that she will come back and play with her whenever she desires. Thus, Pecola’s hallucination underscores her loneliness and lack of friends. Lourie Vickroy writes, ‘Neither her family nor community can offer Pecola support the latter are embarrassed or revolted by her incestuous pregnancy and madness. They blame the “dog” Cholly, but cannot offer her comfort because her situation is on extreme of their own unacknowledged powerlessness...It is this lack of understanding and response that Morrison attacks the toleration of isolated suffering, which in fact not only reflects but also perpetuates collective suffering.’28 Finally the adult Claudia sums up the main cause of wasting black beauty as, ‘This soil is bad for certain kinds of flowers Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear and when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live. We are wrong, of course, but it doesn’t matter. It’s too late at least on the edge of my town, among the garbage and the sunflowers of my town, its much, much, much too late.’ (164) 

Dr Manisha Patil 

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