ONLINE HINDI JOURNAL

Sunday, 27 August 2023

कवि सम्मेलन – सम्मान समारोह सम्पन्न

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कवि सम्मेलन – सम्मान समारोह सम्पन्न

शनिवार, दिनांक 26 अगस्त 2023 को के.एम.अग्रवाल कला, वाणिज्य एवं विज्ञान महाविद्यालय,कल्याण एवं उत्तर भारतीय समाजस एजुकेशनल एंड रिसर्च इंस्टीट्यूट के संयुक्त तत्वावधान में स्नेह मिलन - सम्मान समारोह एवं कवि सम्मेलन का भव्य आयोजन किया गया । इस अवसर पर समारोह अध्यक्ष डॉ. आर.बी. सिंह अध्यक्ष - के एम अग्रवाल महाविद्यालय नियामक मंडल , प्रमुख अतिथि डॉ नरेश चंद्र जी,डायरेक्टर- बी.के. बिर्ला महाविद्यालय,कल्याण , डॉ राजू वारसी, श्री बाबा तिवारी, श्री ओम प्रकाश पाण्डेय, डॉ अनघा राणे, श्री हृदय पंडित, डॉ हरीश दुबे उपस्थित थे । जिनका विशेष सम्मान था उनमें डॉ. पद्मिनी कृष्णा,सुप्रसिद्ध शिक्षाविद, कल्याण, डॉ. संतोष वामन कुलकर्णी ,उप प्राचार्य – के. एम. अग्रवाल महाविद्यालय, कल्याण एवं डॉ. मनीष कुमार मिश्रा,सहायक प्राध्यापक – के. एम. अग्रवाल महाविद्यालय, कल्याण उपस्थित थे । प्रथम सत्र का सफल संचालन डॉ राज बहादुर सिंह ने किया । डॉ मनीष कुमार मिश्र का आईसीसीआर द्वारा युज्बेकिस्तान में चयन के लिए सम्मान किया गया तो डॉ संतोष कुलकर्णी जी का उप प्राचार्य बनने एवं पद्मिनी जी को पीएचडी की उपाधि के लिए सम्मानित किया गया ।

कवि सम्मेलन का सफल मंच संचालन - डॉ. विजय पंडित जी ,संस्थापक व ट्रस्टी - अग्रवाल कॉलेज - सोनावणे कॉलेज ने किया । आमंत्रित कवि गण में श्री ओम प्रकाश पांडेय जी "नमन", डॉ. रजनीकांत मिश्रा जी, श्री चंदन राय, डॉ. लक्ष्मण शर्मा ‘वाहिद’ जी और श्री प्रशांत मोरे जी उपस्थित थे । इस अवसर पर बड़ी संख्या में श्रोता उपस्थित थे । कार्यक्रम को सफल बनाने में प्राध्यापक उदय सिंह ने कड़ी मेहनत की ।

कवि सम्मेलन – सम्मान समारोह सम्पन्न

https://youtu.be/ebHGpDPZW2w?si=gQU0eEVLGasUIcik

कवि सम्मेलन – सम्मान समारोह सम्पन्न

Friday, 4 August 2023

New Era of Jammu and Kashmir : En route to a Stronger Economy

This June, Jammu and Kashmir experienced a record-breaking influx of foreign tourists for the first time in decades. Seeing large tourist footfall, the region’s tourist department has decided to take proactive measures for tourism promotion, including visual tours, airline promotions, and other online marketing tools. It has also decided to ensure its presence is felt internationally as an important tourist destination, targeting markets in Dubai, Southeast Asia and North America .

The flourishing tourism is not a new thing for the valley, however, the last time it faced such an influx of international tourists is too distant a memory to remember. Since 1980s, the national as well as international tourism in Kashmir has faced a setback. However, over the last two years, the picture has changed for the better, hopefully for good.

Indeed, the choice of Kashmir as the site for G20 Working Meeting on tourism in May this year, was obvious and yet symbolic. The beauty of Kashmir which renders it the title ‘Paradise on Earth’ makes it an obvious choice for the tourism summit. However, it also had a symbolic value in two ways: One, it replenished the valley’s image as a major tourist destination for the world. Second, it sent a strong signal internationally that despite its tumultuous and acerbic past, Kashmir has been progressively achieving a state of peace and normalcy.

However, it is not only in tourism that Kashmir has been performing well. The valley has recently experienced a surge in startups. More than 400 startups have been registered with the government of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) and StartUp India across sectors including horticulture, food and crafts, and e-commerce. Websites like startupkashmir.org and startupjk.com provide a comprehensive ecosystem, attracting investors and providing training to its youth. In terms of poverty eradication as well, Kashmir seems to be faring quite well. As per the recently released Multi-dimensional Poverty Index , Kashmir’s headcount ratio has fallen from 12.56% in 2015-16 to 4.8% in 2019-21. This implies that more than one million people exited multi-dimensional poverty in J&K by 2019-21. As a multi-dimensional measure, a reduction in poor indicates the fact that over the period between 2016 and 2021, the region has experienced progress over three main socio-economic indicators healthy, education, and standard of living. In this period, J&K has witnessed a drastic fall in the proportion of the population deprived over various indicators pertaining to nutrition, school attendance, sanitation, years of schooling, maternal mortality, and housing, to mention a few.

The strengthening of these socio-economic indicators has been accompanied by infrastructural developments in the region. Mega projects in the valley are transforming the landscape, ensuring economic growth and seamless connectivity for greater social and geographical assimilation of the region connectivity projects3&4. Recently completed T5 tunnel by NHAI, Delhi Amritsar Katra Expressway, Anji Khad Cable Bridge, Kiru Hydro Electric Project are examples of few of the upcoming mega infrastructural projects that will transform the region.

With the New Industrial Policy , 2021-30 for J&K, more than 66,000 crores of investments have been promised by December 2022. With the peace restored , business opportunities are booming as investors are developing confidence in the law-and-order situation of the region. It has also been attracting FDI, most notable being the Emaar group from Dubai, undertaking projects to build commercial spaces in the valley . At the Center, Indian Union Government announced the New Central Sector Scheme for Industrial Development of the Union Territory of J&K. It provides incentives to investor under four categories: capital investment incentive, capital interest subvention, GST-linked incentive and working capital interest subvention .

The steady economic growth witnessed by J&K over last couple of years has brought in the era of what is popularly called Naya (New) Jammu and Kashmir in India. J&K is moving fast and marching ahead. With better socio-economic indicators, emerging peace, and reduced deprivation, the living standards in the valley are improving. This is accompanied by the concerted efforts to strengthen the economy by both J&K government and the Indian Union Government. Boosting tourism, enhancing the ease of doing business, attracting investments, and germinating a startup culture, along with multi-modal infrastructure projects, envisage the beginning of the building of an economically stable and progressive J&K. With the removal of roadblocks and improving economic development, the dream of emerging Jammu and Kashmir is in coherence with emerging India.

*******

Monday, 31 July 2023

Authentic Black Woman: Tar Baby

Dr Manisha Patil

The real issue in Son-Jadine relationship is the black man’s attempt to possess body and soul of black woman so that he can assert his male identity in a white world which effeminates him. Though, unlike Cholly he is not the first-hand victim of ‘rape’ by whites, he is well aware of the cultural pressure exercised on blacks overtly and covertly and the fact that whatever he might do, a black man cannot be in the position of power in the outside white world. So, he wants to assert his male power within house in relation to black women. When his wife cheats him, he kills her and her teenage lover (both blacks) by driving the jeep into the house and setting the whole house on fire. After that for eight years he moves from place to place as an aimless wanderer. When finally, he comes to Isle des Chevaliers and watches Jadine sleep in the darkness of the night, he has the urge to possess her and settle down as a house hold man. However, she has not only thoroughly internalized the white culture but also decided to marry a white European man Ryk. This Son interprets as one more instance of a white man dispossessing a black man of his rightful claim over a black woman. What is even more perplexing is that in this case black woman is on the side of white man instead of the black man whom she considers as an animal. During their first open encounter, Jadine fears Son as the stereotypical black raper, calls him ‘ape’, ‘nigger’, ‘baboon’ and says, “I know you are an animal because I smell you.” Son in turn threatens Jadine to throw her out of window, humiliates her by calling her a ‘white girl’, asserts his right to tell her what a black woman is or ought to be and finally ‘He rubbed his chin in her hair and blew at the little strand over her ears. “I smell you too,” he said, and pressed his loins as far as he could into the muted print of her Madeira skirt. “I smell you too.”‘ (121-2)

What is clear from the above passage is that Son wants to possess Jadine sexually and simultaneously, mould her into the ‘ideal’ black woman. Although, he succeeds in the former by comforting her and telling her the story of star, he cannot succeed in the later. Son mistakenly assumes that as he seduced her into sex by telling the story of star, he can seduce her into so-called black authenticity by making her experience ‘Southern small-town country romanticism’ (259) at his home town Eloe. During their early relationship, Jadine gradually becomes ‘unorphaned’ i.e., she seems to be moving toward a recovery of her cultural identity as an African woman. When she goes to Eloe, Aunt Rosa in repeatedly referring her as ‘daughter’ explicitly attempts to unorphan, reclaim and revise Jadine’s identity as a member of the cultural community. However, her dreams of night women destroy this process.

Jadine rightly realizes that the stereotypical role of mother will put an end to her career once and for ever. Furthermore, the life in a provincial all black town is so restrictive – emotionally, intellectually, physically and even sexually – symbolized by Aunt Rosa’s small, suffocating bedroom without windows that she fears that it will chock her life. Jadine like Sula, resents and then rejects the subservient roles that black women have generally filled in the society. They believe that community and societal roles traditionally expected of black women are too limiting. Too much of their time has historically been given over to the domestic work of making life comfortable for others, resulting in few chances for them to think about or to realize their own self-fulfillment… Both of them especially resent the black woman’s acceptance of this role for herself. Thus, even at the risk of distancing themselves from other black women, they seek to assert a sense of self defined outside of the parameters set for women by black community as well as by the society at large: “Your way is one…but it’s not my way,” Jadine admits to her aunt, “I don’t want to be …like you…I don’t want to be that kind of woman.”14 The struggles these fictional women encounter are directly reflective of problems encountered in a society that is in the midst of dramatic changes. Because of a shifting of positions between men and women in modern American society, the space is open for a wider variety of circumstances in which to place women for literary purposes. In an analysis of real women in real crises, Jongeward and Scott have described the modern dilemma for women as follows:

In response to the forces that tug and tear at them, women are often set against not only men, but one another. Some women staunchly defend their traditional roles. Some smolder in anger discontented with their lot. Others turn their backs on women’s problems. But probably most feel perplexed and confused. They realize that something significant is happening to women, but the problems remain muddled.15

In a key scene earlier in the novel, on Isle des Cheveliers, Jadine is attracted toward an ‘amazing’ mossy floor of swamp but when she goes near it, she falls into the sticky stuff knee-deep. According to the local myth, that is the place where swamp women live and mate with the horsemen up in the hills. Swamp women represent traditional black women while the horsemen represent the blind slaves. The Swamp women ‘were delighted when they first saw her, thinking a runaway child had been restored to them. But upon looking closer they saw differently. This girl was fighting to get away from them. The women hanging from the trees were quiet now, but arrogant – mindful as they were of their values, their exceptional femaleness; knowing as they did that the first world of the world had been built with their sacred properties; that they alone could hold together the stones of pyramids and the rushes of Moses’s crib; knowing their steady consistency, their place of glaciers, their permanent embrace, they wondered at the girl’s desperate struggle down below to be free, to be something other than they were.’ (183) In this foreshadowing, Jadine almost becomes one of the swamp women but rescues herself on her own, while son is fated to join the blind horsemen. As Karin Luisa Badt states, ‘She fears being cast as a representative of her race and join its “fraternity”. Given the atrocities in Afro-American history, to return to one’s “roots” has the psychic resonance of returning to a subjugated position.’16

Ann Rayson in her essay Foreign Exotic or Domestic Drudge?: The African American Women in ‘Quicksand’ and ‘Tar Baby’ Novels by Nella Larson and Toni Morrison17, gives a studious account of racial, sexual and cultural choices available to black women. Like Jadine, Helga Crane, the heroine of Quicksand, is an orphan taken in by her aunt and uncle, courted by white European and black American men who represent respectively wealth, position, power and asexuality versus poverty, anti-intellectualism and sexuality. Helga rejects the highest European bidder to her body for poor but ‘authentic’ black man and thus wins the applause for her moral choice. But Nella Larson clearly tells us that Helga sinks into quicksand as her life travels in a downward spiral almost from the beginning. As a beleaguered and eternally pregnant wife of an ignorant small town Southern preacher, Helga encounters an emotional and psychological defeat. She falls into the stereotype but win’s the victim’s sympathy. Jadine on the other hand, refuses to be both a stereotype and a victim. She recognizes the trap of Eloe, so chooses Europe and the peacock’s role. She does not have her ‘ancient properties’ but she does survive on her own terms. Trudier Harris write that it is ‘easy to be unsympathetic to Jadine’ because she is a black female in the Stagolee tradition and ‘African American folk culture has not prepared us well for a female outlaw...Women who dare to assert individualistic values over communal ones are summarily put in their places. Men who follow individualistic paths are doomed heroic; that remains so even when they are consciously iconoclastic outlaws such as Stagolee.’18

Jadine rejects the romanticized Southern Black Community but as well as stereotypical role expected of her articulated by Ondine as ‘daughter’.

“Jadine, a girl has to be a daughter first. She have to learn that. And if she never learns how to be a daughter, she can’t never learn how to be a woman. I mean a real woman: a woman good enough for a child; good enough for a man – good enough even for the respect of other women. […] A daughter is a woman that cares about where she come from and takes care of them that took care of her...What I want from you is what I want for you. I don’t want you to take care about me for my sake. I want you to take care about me for yours.”

But Jadine tells her, “There are other ways to be a woman, Nanadine…I don’t want to be the kind of woman you are talking about because I don’t want to be that kind of woman.” But Ondine insists, “There ain’t but one kind. Just one…” (281-2) Both Jadine and Ondine are right at their own place but there will remain friction between them unless and until Jadine comes to terms with being both successful and caring. Jadine starts reconciling these two roles immediately after she boards the plane to go to Paris. She muses, ‘She would go back to Paris and begin at Go. Let loose the dogs, tangle with the woman in yellow – with her and with all the night women who had looked at her. No more shoulders and limitless chests. No more dreams of safety. No more. Perhaps that was the thing – the thing Ondine was saying. A grown woman did not need safety or its dreams. She was the safety she longed for.’ (290)

Here Jadine does acknowledge her gratitude to Ondine. At the same time, she makes it clear that she will not marry her white boyfriend Ryk whom even early in the novel she suspects, ‘I guess the person I want to marry is him but I wonder if the person he wants to marry is me or a black girl?’ (48) Like Miranda in The Tempest she is reduced to a female body contested for by black and white males. However, unlike her white counterpart who is totally under male control, Jadine chooses her own way rejecting both the males. Now freed off the hegemonies of both black man and white man, she marches ahead to become a ‘whole’ and ‘authentic’ (of her own making, neither a stereotype nor a mimic) black woman. Jadine tries to escape America’s binary and self-defeating stereotype by returning to Paris, where there might be another choice fifty years after Helga gave up trying to reconciliate both sides of heritage. Helga saves her soul in a parody of religious conversion to lose her life in Larson’s unromanticized folk culture of rural South. Jadine gives up the soul of a black folk culture she never knew, one which Son has romanticized and that may not exist to survive. Hazel Carby in the last sentence of Reconstructing Womanhood says,

African American cultural and literary history should not create and glorify a limited vision, a vision which in its romantic evocation of the rural and the folk [referring to Hurtson and Walker] avoids some of the most crucial and urgent issues of cultural struggle – a struggle that Larson, Petry, West, Brooks and Morrison recognizes would have to be faced in the cities, the home of the black working class.19

Jadine has this struggle in mind when she wants Son to leave Eloe behind and focus on their future in New York. But, Son whose thinking is circumscribed by the plantation slavery cannot understand the present scenario and how it is different from the past. He unwittingly compares Jadine’s aspirations for success with the subjugation of blacks during the slavery time.

“…you can do exactly what you bitches have always done: take care of white folk’s children. Feed, love and care for white people’s children. That’s what you were born for, that’s what you have waited for all your life. So have that white man’s baby, that’s your job. You have been done it for two hundred years, you can do it for two hundred more. There are no ‘mixed’ marriages. It just looks that way. People don’t mix races; they abandon them or pick them. But I want to tell you something: if you have a white man’s baby, you have chosen to be just another mammy only you are the real mammy ‘cause you had it in your womb and you are still taking care of white folk’s children. Fat or skinny, head rag or wig, cook or model, you take care of white folk’s babies – that’s what you do and when you don’t have any white man’s baby to take care of you make one – out of the babies, black men give you. You turn little black babies into little white ones…you turn your men into white men...You think I won’t do all that company shit because I don’t know how? I can do anything! Anything! But I shall be god-damn if I’ll do that!” (269-70)

Then he tells her the story of Tar Baby – how a white farmer (Valerian) places a tar covered doll (Jadine) by the side of a road to trap Brer Rabbit (Son) – and at the same time rapes her. According to John Duvell, ‘Son’s sexual violation of Jadine is startling in two ways: first for the way that critics have commented upon this key scene without noticing the sexual violation; and second, for the way that Morrison’s own less-than candid remarks have helped to conceal the rape…There are good reasons for readers to miss Son’s rape of Jadine because the text is at pains to construct Son as non-rapist by questioning stereotypes about black male sexuality. When Son is first ‘introduced’ to Valerian’s household, it is with a gun at his back and with a general presumption that he was planning to rape Margaret, Valerian’s wife, since he had been hiding in her closet…[However as Ondine says, “He didn’t rape anybody. Didn’t even try.”] …Son in the days before his discovery, has been entering Jadine’s room at night to gaze on her sleeping features. Surely here is his opportunity to rape her and yet he restrains himself physically, content with an apparently innocuous goal:

he had thought hard during those times in order to manipulate her dreams, to insert his own dreams into her so she…would lie still and dream steadily the dreams he wanted her to have about yellow houses with white doors which women opened and shouted Come on in, you honey you! and the fat black ladies in white dresses minding the pie table in the basement of the church and white wet sheets flapping on the line[...] (119)

Again, the text insists on Son as non-rapist and yet clearly his goal is penetration/insertion, the penetration of Jadine’s unconscious, in order to get this ‘yellow’ to think the world in terms of the black woman in the yellow dress whose insult sends Jadine scurrying back to Valerian’s island in the beginning. The question is whether Son’s penetration will be forced or consensual.’20 When all his attempts to get Jadine’s consent to her willing submission fail, he resorts to physical violence. He picks her up and dangles her out the window of their apartment while he tells her she must cease her classiest assumptions. His violent ‘pedagogy’ anticipates his attempt a few pages later to rape her into a ‘correct’ subject position. Now Jadine realizes that the physical and psychological abuse is too high a price to pay to be granted authenticity within Son’s patriarchy. Morrison also obliquely suggests that black female identity need not accept its construction by black men, particularly when that construction is complicitous with the assumptions of white patriarchy. Jadine deflates Son’s all claims to righteousness by giving him ‘his original dime’.

“Here it is. Your original dime. The one you cleaned sheep head for, right? The one you loved? The only one you loved? All you want ‘in the money line.’ Take it. Now you know where it came from, your original dime: some black woman like me fucked a white man for it and then gave it to Frisco who made you work your ass off for it. That’s your original dime.” (272)

On a closer look, we realize that ‘[w]hat Son wants to do to the fashion model Jadine is what Valerian has already done to Margaret, the former Maine beauty queen; namely construct a female subjectivity that effaces itself the better to serve male identity. If Valerian has made Jadine a tar baby in one sense (a black woman more cathected to white culture than black), Son surely wishes to make her a tar baby in another (a nurturing black mama who will never ask to share a male authority or autonomy). On this particular point, what’s so African about Son or Eloe for that matter?’21

Dr Manisha Patil

Wednesday, 19 July 2023

Dr Kiran Seth Cycle Yatra schedule

Date /Day /Starting point /End Point/ Distance (KM)

17-July-2023 monday Mumbai (IIT) Kalyan 34

18-July-2023 Tuesday Kalyan Shahpur 42.6

19 July-2023 Wednesday Shahpur Igatpuri 49.1

20-July-2023 Thursday Igatpuri Nashik 45.5

21-July2023 Friday Nashik

22-July-2023 Saturday Nashik Sinnar 36 km

23-July 2023 Sunday Sinnar Shirdi 52 km

24-July-2023 Monday Shirdi

25-July-2023 Tuesday Shirdi Mahalgaon 46.4

26-July-2023 Wednesday Mahalgaon Aurangabad 55

27-Jul-2023 Thursday Aurangabad

28 Jul-2023 Friday Aurangabad jalna 58

29-Jul-2023 Saturday Jalna Deulgaon mahi 47.6

30-Jul-2023 Sunday Deulgaon Mahi buldhana 58

31Jul-2023 monday Mahi buldhana khamgaon 49

1-Aug-2023 Tuesday khamgaon Shegaon 18

2-Aug-2023 Wednesday Shegaon

3 Aug-2023 Thursday. Shegaon Akola 43.9

4-Aug 2023 Friday Akola Daryapur 49.7

5 Aug 2023 Saturday Daryapur Amravati 48.7

6 Aug-2023 Sunday Amravati

7 -Aug-2023 Monday Amravati

8-Aug 2023 Tuesday Amravati dattapur Dhamngaon 50.7

9 -Aug -2023 Wednesday Dattapur Dhamngaon wardha 54.8

10 Aug -2023 Thursday Wardha Asola 38 km

11 Aug 2023 friday Asola Nagpur 39

12 Aug--2023 Saturday. Nagpur

13 Aug 2023 Sunday Nagpur

14 -Aug-2023 Monday Nagpur Mauda 34.3

15 -Aug-2023 Tuesday Mauda Bhandara 28

16-Aug 2023 wednesday Bhandara Sakoli 41.7

17-Aug -2023 Thursday Sakoli Deori 41

18-Aug 2023 Friday Deori Ayudabari 51

19 Aug 2023 Saturday Ayudabari Rajnandgaon 30

20 Aug 2023 sunday Rajnandgaon Durg / Bhilai 28.9

21 Aug Monday Durg/ Bhilai

22 Aug Tuesday Durg/Bhilai Raipur 38.7

Tuesday, 18 July 2023

पद्मश्री डॉ किरण सेठ का के. एम. अग्रवाल महाविद्यालय में आगमन।

सोमवार दिनांक 17 जुलाई 2023 को के.एम. अग्रवाल महाविद्यालय, कल्याण पश्चिम में स्पीक मैके के संस्थापक पद्मश्री डॉ किरण सेठ का आगमन हुआ । डॉ. किरण सेठ न केवल स्पीक मैके के संस्थापक हैं बल्कि आप आईआईटी दिल्ली के पूर्व प्रोफेसर भी हैं और आप कश्मीर से लेकर कन्याकुमारी तक साईकिल पर भारत की पूरी यात्रा पर निकले हुए हैं । अपनी इस साइकल यात्रा कार्यक्रम के अंतर्गत आप पूरे भारत के भ्रमण पर हैं और स्कूल एवं कॉलेज में विद्यार्थियों को भारत की संस्कृति, शिक्षा, यहां के शास्त्रीय संगीत के बारे में जागरूक करना उनका मुख्य उद्देश्य है। विद्यार्थियों को किस तरह से योग और ध्यान के माध्यम से अपनी एकाग्रता बढ़ानी चाहिए, इसके बारे में उन्हें जागरूक करने का काम डॉ किरण सेठ लगातार कर रहे हैं । 73 वर्ष की आयु में किरण सेठ जी कश्मीर से कन्याकुमारी तक साईकिल चलाकर जो जागरूकता अभियान चला रहे हैं वो बेमिसाल है।

के एम अग्रवाल महाविद्यालय में हिन्दी विभाग की तरफ से उनका स्वागत हुआ । के एम अग्रवाल महाविद्यालय की प्राचार्य डॉ अनिता मन्ना एवं संस्था के संयुक्त सचिव श्री ओमप्रकाश मुन्ना पांडे ने शॉल , श्रीफल और पुष्पगुच्छ देकर किरण सेठ का महाविद्यालय की तरफ से स्वागत किया । स्पीक मैके मुंबई के पदाधिकारियों में नेहा भट्टाचार्य जी भी इस अवसर पर उपस्थित थीं । डॉ मनीष कुमार मिश्रा ने पूरे कार्यक्रम के संचालन का कार्य किया और डॉ किरण सेठ का विधिवत परिचय दिया । डॉ किरण सेठ ने विद्यार्थियों के साथ संवाद करते हुए अपने जीवन के बहुत से अनुभव साझा किए। श्री ओम प्रकाश मुन्ना पांडेय जी ने महाविद्यालय प्रबंधन की तरफ से किरण सेठ जी का स्वागत करते हुए हर संभव सहयोग का आश्वासन दिया। के.एम. अग्रवाल कनिष्ठ महाविद्यालय के उप प्राचार्य श्रीमान महेंद्र राजपूत जी ने कार्यक्रम के अंत में सब के प्रति आभार ज्ञापित किया ।

इस कार्यक्रम में बड़ी संख्या में महाविद्यालय के छात्र,शिक्षक और कर्मचारी गण उपस्थित थे ।इस कार्यक्रम को सफल बनाने के लिए श्री उदय सिंह, श्री राकेश सिंह के साथ-साथ महाविद्यालय के अन्य शिक्षक एवं कर्मचारी लगातार लगे रहे और सब के संयुक्त प्रयास से बड़े ही सुखद वातावरण में यह कार्यक्रम संपन्न हुआ । डॉ किरण सेठ ने महाविद्यालय के प्रति आभार व्यक्त किया एवं महाविद्यालय और स्पीक मैके इन दो संस्थाओं के बीच में एक मेमोरेंडम आफ अंडरस्टैंडिंग (एम.ओ.यू )भी साइन किया गया ।जिसके माध्यम से भविष्य में दोनों संस्थाओं के संयुक्त तत्वावधान में बहुत सारे सांस्कृतिक कार्यक्रमों का लगातार आयोजन होता रहेगा ।

Saturday, 15 July 2023

Trapping: Tar Baby

Dr Manisha Patil

This encounter makes it clear that Son and Jadine are facing two opposite directions and though they cross each other’s paths for a brief time, they cannot sustain it for long. Casting himself as Brer Rabbit and Valerian as the white farmer, Son condemns Jadine as an unthinking tool of the white world. “There was a farmer – a white farmer… and he had this bullshit bullshit bullshit farm. And a rabbit. A rabbit came along and ate couple of his …ow…cabbages…so he got this idea about how to get him. How to, to trap…this rabbit. And you know what he did? He made him a tar baby. He made it, you hear me? He made it!” (270) Spoken in a moment of passionate anger, this version of myth represses a great deal of Jadine’s personal history. The repression reflects Son’s own desire for safety; he creates a counter myth that would justify evading the risk and pain associated with mature love. Son contributes to the collapse of his relationship with Jadine by constructing a romantic counter-myth of blackness that represses aspects of black women’s experience. Holding to the folk myth of the white world as a tar baby, Son creates a complementary myth of Eloe as a briar patch. In his memory, Eloe provides an image of safety, offering release from the pressure of remaining constantly on guard against the traps of white world. Like all myths of safety in Tar Baby however Son’s myth collapses. Eloe cannot comprehend or support his relationship with Jadine. Although he describes Eloe as “All black” Jadine quickly observes its dependence on white technology (172). Son removes Eloe from history, freezing his idea of briar patch rather than adapting it to changes in sexual roles. By embracing a myth that dehistoricizes Jadine’s complex personal history as a black woman, he increases the possibility of suffering the loss he most fears.22 Though Son realizes his mistake, it is too late. Jadine has already left for Paris. He can neither go back to Eloe because finally narrow, limited vision of his idea of authentic black life has dawned upon him. In this moment of utter helplessness, Therese takes over the charge and takes him to the other side of the island. She tells him, “This is the place where you can take a choice. Back there you say you don’t. Now you do.” “Forget her. There is nothing in her parts for you. She has forgotten her ancient properties.” (305) “The men. The men are waiting for you. You can choose now. You can get free of her. They are waiting in the hills for you. They are naked and they are blind too. I have seen them; their eyes have no color in them. But they gallop; they race those horses like angles all over the hills where the rain forest is, where the champion daisy trees still grow. Go there. Choose them.” (306)

The end is very ambiguous. Son runs lickety-split, lickety-split to join the blind horsemen. He becomes the stereotype elevated to myth. Consistent with Morrison’s drawing upon the life cycle of the male soldier ant, which dies once it has mated, Son metaphorically dies after raping Jadine. His one role – to initiate her struggle to attain a more self-conscious racialized and gendered identity – is over. Although he attempts to pursue Jadine back to Valerian’s island, Therese rows him to the back side of the island where son essentially ceases to be representational, becoming instead a kind of cartoon rabbit and escaping back into his same-as-never-was briar patch. Son relegated to the trash heap, not of history but of mythology. Morrison speaking of Son’s end, claims that he ‘may identify totally and exclusively with the past, which is a kind of death, because it means you have no future, but a suspended place.’23 Thus Son becomes the stereotype elevated to myth. Yet from a critical point of view, choices available to both Son and Jadine are still negative and there are no real solutions as such. As Trudier Harris sees ‘both Son and Jadine are tar babies and tricksters with Jadine having an upper hand.’24 From the beginning Jadine recognizes Son as a tar baby, a threat to her safety. Her alienation from Afro-American tribal literacy renders Jadine vulnerable to individuals associated with the history repressed by dominant myths: the African woman in yellow who spits at her and Son himself. Son attempts to draw Jadine out of the safety of the white world releasing the ‘night women’ whom she encounters during her visit to Eloe. Although she retreats from some implications of the vision, Jadine begins to reach beneath the surface of the racial and sexual myths to the ambiguous history that has shaped her is-ness as a contemporary Afro-American woman. Recognizing the inadequacy of the myths she has accepted, most particularly the encompassing myth of safety, Jadine takes control of her own destiny.25 (‘A grown woman did not need safety or its dreams. She was the safety she longed for.’) Now she neither represses her black femaleness nor is she carried away by its romantic notion which tries to entrap her. Thus Jadine rescues herself from the tar pit while Son is trapped. However, for African American community to progress in the real sense, neither of these one-dimensional choices is satisfactory. What is needed is the combination of rejection and appropriation and most importantly the reconciliation between black men and women. According to Bharati Parikh, ‘In Tar Baby Morrison suggest that reconciliation between black man and black woman can only occur when they mutually understand that they are both victims of racial exploitation.’26 So this understanding and reconciliation between black men and women is taken up as one of the major themes of Morrison’s next novel Beloved.

Dr Manisha Patil

Monday, 10 July 2023

Select Bibliography : Toni Literature

Dr Manisha Patil

Primary Sources

1. Morrison, Toni, Song of Solomon (1977), New York: Vintage, 2004

2. Morrison, Toni, Sula (1973), New York: Vintage, 2004

3. Morrison, Toni, Tar Baby (1981), New York: Vintage, 2004

4. Morrison, Toni, The Bluest Eye (1970), London: Vintage, 1999

Secondary Sources

Books

1. Abrams, M.H., A Glossary of Literary Terms, 7/e, Harcourt College Publishers, 2001.

2. Achebe, Chinua, Hopes and Impediment: Selected Essays, New York: Doubleday, 1988

3. Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (rev. ed.) London: Verso. 1991.

4. Anzaldua, Gloria, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1987

5. Ashcroft, B., Griffiths, G., Tiffin, H., Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Postcolonial Literatures, Routledge, London, 1989.

6. Barker, Philip, Michael Foucault: Introduction, Edinburgh University Press, 1998.

7. Bhabha, Homi K., Nation and Narration, Routledge, New York and London, 1990.

8. Bhabha, Homi K., The Location of Culture, Routledge, London, 1994.

9. Birch, Eva Lennox, A Quilt of Many Colors: Black American Women Writing, London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994

10. Carby, Hazel, Reconstructing Womanhood, New York: Oxford University Press, 1987

11. Chatterjee, Parth, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1993

12. Christian, Barbara, Black feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers, New York: Pergamon, 1985

13. Derrida, Jacques, Writing and Difference, Trans. Alan Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1978. 297

14. Duvell, John, The Identifying the Fictions of Toni Morrison, Palgrave, New York, 2000.

15. Ellison, Ralph, Shadow and Act, New York: Random, 1964

16. Fanon, Franz, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann, Grove Press, New York, 1967. (Original French edition 1952)

17. Fanon, Franz, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington. Grove Press, New York, 1986. (Original French edition 1961)

18. Foucault Michael, ‘Truth and Power’ Power / Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-77. Ed Colin Gorden. Trans LeoMarshall, John Mepham and Kate Soper, New York: Pantheon, 1980. 131

19. Gandhi, Leela, Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction, Oxford University Press, 1998.

20. Gates, Henry Louis Jr. and K. A. Appiah. (ed.), Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, Amistad, New York, 1993.

21. Gilroy, Paul, Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of Black Cultures, London: Serpent’s Tail P, 1995.

22. Grewal, Gurleen, Circles of Sorrow, Lines of Struggle, Louisiana State University Press, 1998.

23. Harris, Trudier, Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Toni Morrison, Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991

24. Hutcheon, Linda, The Politics of Postmodernism, New York: Routledge, 1989

25. Johnson, Barbara, A World of Difference, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987

26. Loomba, Ania, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, Routledge: London, 1998.

27. Mbalia, Doreatha Drummund, Toni Morrison’s Developing Class Consciousness, Toronto: Associated University Press, 1991.

28. McKay, Nellie Y. (ed), Critical Essays on Toni Morrison, G. K. Hall and Co., Boston, 1988

29. Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and Literary Imagination. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993.

30. Nandy, Ashish, Oppression and Human Liberation: toward a post-Gandhian Utopia, Political Thought in Modern India, ed. Thomas Pantham and Kenneth L. Deutsch, Sage, New Delhi, 1986

31. Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African literature, London: James Currey, 1989.

32. Page, Philip, Dangerous Freedom: Fusion and Fragmentation in Toni Morrison’s Novels, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995

33. Peterson, Nancy J. (ed.), Toni Morrison: Critical and Theoretical Approaches, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London, 1997

34. Rodney, Walter, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Dar e Salaam: Tanzania Publishing House, 1972.

35. Said, Edward, Orientalism: Western Concepts of the Orient, Pantheon Books, 1978

36. Taylor-Guthrie, Danille Kathleen (ed.), Conversations with Toni Morrison, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994

37. Vishwanathan, Gauri, Mask of Conquest: Literary Studies and British Rule in India, Faber and Faber, London, 1989

38. Walker, Alice, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, San Diego: Harcourt, 1983

39. Young, Robert, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Culture, Theory and Race, Routledge, London and New York, 1995

40. Young, Robert, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction, Blackwell Publishers, Oxford and Malden, Mass., 2001.

41. Young, Robert, Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2003.

42. Young, Robert, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West Routledge, London and New York 1990. Second edition, 2004.

Articles

1. Badt, Karin Luisa, “The Roots of the Body in Toni Morrison: A Matter of ‘Ancient Properties’,” African American Review, Vol. 29, No. 4, Winter 1995.

2. Baker, Houston A Jr., When Lindbergh Sleeps with Bessie Smith: The Writing of Place in Sula, Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr., New York: Amistad P, 1993

3. Berendt, Joachim E., The Jazz Book: From Ragtime to Fusion and Beyond, Rev. Gupther Huesmann Trans. H and B Bredigkeit, et al. Brooklyn Lawrence Hill, (1992) 161

4. Bergenholtz, Rita, Toni Morrison’s Sula: A satire on Binary Thinking, African American Review, Volume 30, Issue 1, 1996, pg. 89 +

5. Butter, R. J., Open Movement and Selfhood in Toni Morrison’s Song Of Solomon, Centennial Review XXVIII – XXIX (1984-85)

6. Campbell, Sean, Struggling with a History of Capitalism in Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby.<http://www.class.uidaho.edu/banks/1999/articles/struggling_with_a_history.htm>

7. Denard, Carolyn, The Convergence of Feminism and Ethnicity in the Fiction of Toni Morrison, Critical essays on Toni Morrison, ed. Nellie Y. McKay, G. K. Hall and Co., Boston, 1988

8. Duberstein, Roberta, Singing the Blues / Reclaiming Jazz: Toni Morrison and Cultured Mourning, Mosaic, Vol. 31, Issue 2, 1998

9. Galehouse, Maggie, New World Woman: Toni Morrison’s Sula, Papers on Language and Literature, Southern Illinois University, 1999. pg. 339 +

10. Gillan Jennifer, “Focusing on the Wrong Front: Historical Displacement, the Maginot Line and The Bluest Eye,” African American Review, Vol. 36, No 2, 2002

11. Goldner, Ellen J., Other Ghosts: Gothicism and the Bonds of Reason in Melville, Chesnutt and Morrison, MELUS (The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnics Literature of the United States), Spring 1999

12. Heyman, Richard, “Universalization and Its Discontents: Morrison’s Song of Solomon.” A (w)holy Black Text, African American Review Vol. 29, No.3, 1995

13. Hunt, Patricia, “War and Peace: Transfigured Categories and the Politics of Sula,” African American Review, Volume 27, Issue 3, 1993, pg. 443+

14. Khayati Abdellatif, “Representation, Race and the Language of the Ineffable in Toni Morrison’s Narrative,” African American Review, Vol. 33, No. 2, Summer, 1999.

15. Knadler, Stephen., “Domestic Violence in the Harlem Renaissance,” African American Review Vol. 38, No. 1, 2004

16. Kuenz, Jane, “The Bluest Eye: Notes on History, community and Black Female Subjectivity,” African American Review, Vol. 27, Issue 3, 1993

17. Lee, Catherine Carr, The South in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon: Initiation, healing and home, Studies in the Literary Imagination, Fall 1998

18. Lorde, Audre, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” Whole Earth Review, Summer, 1989

19. Mayberry, Susan Neal, “Something other than a family quarrel: The Beautiful Boys in Morrison’s Sula,” African American Review, Volume 37, No. 4, 2003

20. McKee, Patricia, Spacing and Placing Experience in Toni Morrison’s Sula, Toni Morrison: Critical and Theoretical Approaches, ed. Nancy J. Peterson, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London, 1997

21. Morrison, Toni, Art of Fiction, CXXXIV, Paris Review 128 (1993)

22. Morrison, Toni, What the Black Woman Thinks about Women’s Lib?, New York Times Magazine 22 August 1971: +

23. Morrison, Toni, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in America Literature,” Michigan Quarterly Review 28 919890: 1-34

24. Moses, Cat, “The Blues Aesthetic in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye,” African American Review, Winter, 1999

25. Naomi Van Tol, The Fathers may Soar: Folklore and Blues in Song of Solomon <http://spiny.com/naomi/thesis>

26. Parikh, Bharati A., Black Women Novelist: Development, Flowering and Fruitation of a Tradition, Toni Morrison’s Beloved: A Reader’s Companion, ed. Ayesha Irfan, Asia Book Club, 2002

27. Pereira, Malin Walther, Periodizing Toni Morrison’s Work from The Bluest Eye to Jazz: The Importance of Tar Baby MELUS (The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnics Literature of the United States), Vol. 22 Issue 3, 1997

28. Pessoni, Michele, “‘She was laughing at their God’: Discovering the Goddess within Sula,” African American Review, Volume 29, Issue 3, 1995

29. Powell, Timothy B., Toni Morrison: The struggle to Depict the Black Figure on the White Page, Black American literature Forum 24 (1990)

30. Rayson, Ann, Foreign Exotic or Domestic Drudge? : The African American Women in Quicksand and Tar Baby Novels by Nella Larson and Toni Morrison, MELUS (The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnics Literature of the United States), Summer, 1998

31. Robenstein, Roberta, Signing the Blues /Reclaiming Jazz: Toni Morrison and Cultural Mourning, Mosaic, Vol. 31, issue 2, 1998.

32. Rothberg, Michael, “Dead Letter Office: Conspiracy Trauma and Song of Solomon’s Posthumous Communication,” African American Review, Winter 2003

33. Ryan, J.S., Contested Vision/Double Vision in Tar Baby, Toni Morrison: Critical and Theoretical Approaches, ed. Nancy J. Peterson, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London, 1997

34. Storhoff, Gary, ‘Anaconda Love’: Parental Enmeshment in Song of Solomon, Style, Summer, 1997

35. Vickroy, Lourie, The Politics of Abuse: The Traumatized child in Toni Morrison and Marguerite Duras, Mosaic, Vol. 29, Issue 2, 1996. pg 91+

36. Werner, C. H., The Briar Patch as Modernist Myth: Morrison, Barthes and Tar Baby As-Is, Critical Essays on Toni Morrison ed. Nellie Y. McKay, G. K. Hall and Co., Boston, 1988

Interviews

1. Bonnie Angelo in an interview with Toni Morrison, The Pain of Being Black: An Interview, Times, 22 May, 1989 p.p. 48-50

2. Carabi, Angels, Interview with Toni Morrison, Belies, Letters (10.2.1995) 40-43

3. Le Clair, Thomas, A Conversation with Toni Morrison: ‘The Language Must Not Sweat.’ New Republic 21 Mar. 1981: 25¬32.

4. Marcus, Janes. This side of Paradise: Interview with Toni Morrison, 1998 Amazon 27Sept. 2005 <http:/www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/feature/-/7651/104-859530-1497527>

5. McKay, Nellie, An Interview with Toni Morrison, Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and K.A. Appiah, New York: Amistand, 193. 411.

6. Morrison, Toni and Paul Grey, Paradise Found, Time 151.1 (1998). 19 Jan 1998. 9 May 2001. <http ://www.time.com/time/magazine/1998/dom/980119/cover1.html>

7. Schappell, Elissa, Interview with Toni Morrison: Women Writers at Work, ed. Paris Review. New York: Modern Library 1998

8. Stepto, Robert B., Intimate Things in Place: A conversation with Toni Morrison, Massachusetts Review 18 (1977): 473-89

Websites

1. http://aalbc.com/authors/toni.htm

2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toni_Morrison

3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcolonialism

4. http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/t/toni_morrison.html

5. http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/show_tag?name=toni

6. http://www.luminarium.org/contemporary/tonimorrison/toni.htm

7. http://www.postcolonialweb.org/poldiscourse/themes/themes.html

8. http://www.tonimorrisonsociety.org/

9. http://www.wsu.edu/~amerstu/tm/poco.html

Dr Manisha Patil

Friday, 7 July 2023

सरल हिंदी पाठ्यक्रम की शुरुआत

के एम अग्रवाल महाविद्यालय कल्याण में हिंदुस्तानी प्रचार सभा के सहयोग से शैक्षणिक सत्र 2023-24 के लिए सरल हिंदी पाठ्यक्रम की शुरुआत हो गई है।

कला, वाणिज्य और विज्ञान के छात्र इसमें प्रवेश ले सकते हैं।

प्रवेश के लिए महाविद्यालय के हिंदी विभाग प्रमुख डॉ मनीष कुमार मिश्रा से संपर्क किया जा सकता है।

ई

Saturday, 1 July 2023

Rejection versus Appropriation: Tar Baby

Dr Manisha Patil

Together Son and Jadine represent the dilemma of African American community as to how to deal with colonization. They represent two differing camps – Jadine favors assimilation while Son advocates cultural nationalism. Son rejects everything white – white law, white education and white-collar jobs. He says, “I don’t want to know their laws, I want to know mine.” (263) Son wants to go back to his roots – pure and authentic black culture unadulterated by white pollution. He wants to settle down in his home town Eloe, in rural South, which he had fled after killing his wife eight years ago. Although he is wandering from place to place for last eight years, Eloe has never left his mind for a minute. He is obsessed with the past. He is still nostalgically longing for the community life at Eloe – the company of Soldier, Drake, Ellen, Aunt Rosa, Old Man (his father), Beatrice and others. For him, life in the city is lonely and sad. ‘The black girls in New York City were crying and their men were looking neither to the right nor to the left’. (215) By contrast in Eloe, people care for each other. It is hard to live in a distant small town with neither welfare line nor unemployment insurance. It takes all the adult strength – physical and mental – to stay there and stay alive and keep a family together. But away from the white interference, they can support each other and have their own identity and individuality. This isolation Son views as the ideal condition for the flowering of pure and authentic black culture.

However, Jadine’s views are different. For her, ‘Eloe was rotten and more boring than ever. A burnt out place. There was no life there. Maybe a past but definitely no future...’ (259) for her, New York is the home. ‘…if ever there was a black woman’s town, New York was it...But there, there, there and there. Snapping whips behind the tellers’ windows, kicking ass at Con Edison offices, barking orders in the record companies, hospitals, public schools. They refused loans at Household Financer, withheld unemployment checks and drivers’ licenses, issued parking tickets and summonses. Gave enemas, blood transfusions and please lady don’t make me mad. They jacked up meetings in boardrooms, turned out luncheons, energized parties, redefined fashion, tipped scales, removed lids, cracked covers and turned an entire telephone company into such a dimondhead of hostility the company paid you for not talking to their operators. The manifesto was simple: “Talk shit, take none.” Jadine remembered and loved it all. This would be her city too, her place…’ (222) Jadine is a successful model whose photograph is displayed on cover page of every fashion magazine in Paris and who has got wide publicity as ‘Copper Venus’. Unlike Pecola, Nel and Hagar who are hurt by, struggle with and ultimately succumb to internalized views of white beauty, Jadine is thoroughly happy with a definition of beauty based on white standards because she fits it. Indeed, if from one perspective, her modeling means objectifying black female as a sexual object, from the other perspective, it symbolizes her power and emancipation. In white commercial America, it is impossible to think about beauty in the context of black women because beauty invariably means white skin, blue eyes and blonde hair. White women are always depicted as the desired object of sexual gratification for both white and black men. Therefore, white feminists in America have argued that to be free, women should break away with this image of sexual object. However, since black women are excluded from the concept of beauty, their liberty or sense of power lies in forcing the society to see them as sexual objects. Jadine has worked very hard not only to achieve this success but also to break away the stereotype of black women as mother which is the legacy of slavery when black women typically worked as producers of black labor force or as the wet mothers and nannies to white children. Jadine’s struggle with motherhood is best illustrated in her dreams of night women.

The women had looked awful to her: onion heels, pot bellies, hair surrendered to rags and braids. And the breasts they thrust at her like weapons were soft, loose bags closed at the tip with a brunette eye. Then the slithery black arm of the woman in yellow, stretching twelve feet, fifteen toward her and the fingers that fingered eggs. It hurt and part of the hurt was in having the vision at all – at being the helpless victim of a dream that chose you...The night women were not merely against her (and her alone, not him), not merely looking superior over their sagging breasts and folded stomachs, they seemed somehow in agreement with each other about her, and were all out to get her, tie her, bind her. Grab the person she had worked hard to become and choke it off with their soft loose tits. (261-2)

Yet, she resists this maternal instinct with all her strength to fulfill her own version of ‘American Dream’. Jadine is the modern, career oriented African American woman who focuses on the future rather than on the past (“There is nothing any of us can do about the past but make our own lives better…that is the only revenge for us to get over.” 271) and who dares to assert individualistic values in a society where women are stereotypically expected to sacrifice themselves for the ‘community’, a euphemism which really means narrow self-interest of their men.

Jadine and Son’s different perspectives and their irreconcilability come to surface when they return from Eloe. Both try to mould each other according to their own ideals. Jadine wants Son to go to college, take a degree and then find a white-collar job. But Son resents the idea. For him, being educated is equal to being white. According to this logic, if getting education is white and becoming successful is white, then a black person who aspires to or achieves these values becomes white. The result of this underlying assumption is that blacks cannot be black and at the same time educated. Whites are educated, whites are bad. If blacks are educated, they become white i.e., bad. So, to remain black is to remain uneducated. Son goes even one step further when he wants Jadine to forget all her ‘white’ education and career and instead accompany him to a small rural town and settle down to a perfect domestic life. This is simply unthinkable for Jadine.

This rescue was not going well. She thought she was rescuing him from the night women who wanted him for themselves, wanted him to feel superior in a cradle, deferring to him; wanted her to settle for wifely competence when she could be almighty, to settle for fertility rather than originality, nurturing instead of building. He thought he was rescuing her from Valerian, meaning them, the aliens, the people who in mere 300 years had killed a world millions of years old. From Micronesia to Liverpool, from Kentucky to Dresden, they killed everything they touched, including their own coastlines, their own hills and forests...Each one was pulling the other away from the maw of hell – its very ridge top. Each knew the world as it was meant or ought to be. One had a past, the other a future and each one bore the culture to save the race in his hands. Mama-spoiled black man, will you mature with me? Culture-bearing black woman whose culture you are bearing? (269)

Frankly speaking the issue of assimilation versus cultural nationalism is one only of degree, not kind. Both white and black cultures in America share, borrow and steal elements from each other yet are reluctant to acknowledge the degree to which they are entangled. Indeed, authenticity is not just hard but impossible to find and achieve. If the African woman in the yellow dress holding three eggs is authentic, why is she then in Paris? As Ashcroft et al. points out, ‘it is not possible to return to or rediscover an absolute pre-colonial cultural purity nor is it possible to create national or regional formations entirely independent of their historical implication in European colonial enterprise.’13

Dr Manisha Patil

Friday, 30 June 2023

Going Back to Roots: Song of Solomon

Going Back to Roots

Dr Manisha Patil

In the conventional American ‘Bildungsroman’ (initiation story), the protagonist moves from a rural to an urban area, from South to North, from community to individualism. Song of Solomon, on the other hand, shows the journey of Milkman from urban North to rural South, from individualism to communal sense. In the words of Catherine Lee, ‘For the authors of these slave narratives [Frederick Douglass’s Narrative and Harriet Jacob’s Incident in the life of a Slave Girl, in which the protagonist moves from an oppressive, enslaving, agrarian South to an enabling, industrial North] leaving behind family, friends and even names was often essential for escape. For the African American community in the twentieth century, however, Morrison suggests that the isolating individualism that erases the memory of the south destroys spiritual and moral identity.’ Lee further explains her point in the following words:

Milkman is indeed naïve about himself, his family and his community, but the very nature of the knowledge he acquires makes Song of Solomon as a different kind of initiation story. The initiate’s knowledge is typically defined as a loss of innocence of recognition of restriction. Milkman begins however, at the point of restriction that comes from separation, from the hyper individualization that grows out of the American culture of competition, capitalism and racism. Like the traditional American initiate, he must recognise his own capacity for evil but the knowledge of his family’s past and his place in a community that evolved from that past enables Milkman to ascend rather than conventionally, to ‘fall through knowledge’ (Fiedler 22). His journey into an African American South strips him of superficial external moorings and submerges him in the communal and spiritual culture of his larger family. With his initiation, Milkman moves from a passive, irresponsible ignorance to an active authentic and liberating participation in the corporate life of black community.4

In Part II, Milkman goes to South in search of the gold. Though the search for gold itself is corrupt, his journey is rewarding at the spiritual level. From Danville to Shalimar, he visits all the places where Macon, Pilate or his other ancestors had lived and collects the fragments of their past to solve the puzzle of their lives and to recover the holistic history of his family. First of all, at Danville, Milkman meets Reverend Cooper who greets him with, “I know your people!” These simple words give him the sense of belongingness for the first time in his life. During the next four days, the other old survivors tell him the story of his grandfather’s life, family and death. During their conversations, he discovers a totally different man, his father was. He was not ‘that stern, greedy, unloving man’ but a loving and generous son and brother. Again, for the first time in his life Milkman envisions his father’s dream of Lincoln’s Heaven and longs for the relationship that his father and grandfather shared. Macon Dead I’s farm symbolized the richness and possibility of the community. It was a ray of hope not only for Macon’s family but for the whole of African American community who saw in it the path of their liberation. But the murder of Macon Dead I, murdered that hope as well. Consequently, when the people at Danville hear about the success of Macon II, their hope is rekindled. However, Morrison shows that even at such a moment, uppermost in Milkman’s mind is the thought of gold. This is an oblique way to show that the drive to own property which meant liberation to Macon I has been perverted into selfishness and endless acquisition by Macon II and the same is perpetuated to the extreme by Macon III (Milkman). Now it is the responsibility of Milkman to rejuvenate the original vision of Lincoln’s Heaven where material prosperity co-existed with communal harmony.

From Reverend Cooper’s house, Milkman goes to Circe, the ancient wise woman who served as the midwife to Milkman’s grandmother Sing and also protected and looked after Macon II and Pilate after their father’s murder. She is the one who tells Milkman the account of Old Macon’s murder and the fact that his body was dumped in the very cave in which the gold was discovered. She is the ‘living relic of the past’5 who serves as a link between historic amnesia and present memory. She reveals the real names of Old Macon as Jake and his wife as Sing. (In her dreams, Pilate saw her father calling out the name ‘Sing’, but as Pilate did not know the name of her mother, she mistook his words as an order to sing a song) and that they came from Charlemagne, a corruption of Shalimar. (The name ‘Charlemagne’ falsifies the history by removing trace of original Afro-centric ‘Solomon’ completely and instead superimposing the Euro-centric ‘Charlemagne’). She also guides Milkman towards the Butler House and the Cave and thus moves him one more step near his lost roots. Milkman’s trips through the woods to the Butler House and the Cave start the process of shedding his old, inauthentic self. ‘To find the house he must make “a mile long walks over moist leaves”, dodging branches of overhead trees. To find the cave, he has to go deeper into the woods, crossing and falling into a creek then climbing the rocky hill side. His watch and cigarettes, those emblems of distraction and city life are smashed and soaked: his thin-soled shoes are of little help. Once inside the cave, he has only his hands, feet and instincts to guide him. His lighter sputters only long enough to show that the gold is gone. In this confrontation with a nature much wilder than the “tended woods” he knew back home, Milkman finds that some genuine feeling begins to emerge, experienced as a ravenous hunger unlike any he has known before.’6

When Milkman goes to Shalimar, he learns one more important lesson – power of naming and importance of community – which he had devalued in his earlier life. Following his old habit of objectifying people, Milkman fails to ask the names of men in the store and calls them ‘them’. By locking his car, he reveals his mistrust and then by suggesting that he would like to have one of their women, exposes his internalized white attitude. This obviously enrages the men and they attack him. Now he learns the second lesson – neither his money can save him nor his daddy can bail him out of trouble. He is fully responsible for his actions. He has to pay the price for his mistakes and he has to defend himself with whatever is immediately at hand. Even at the age of thirty two, Milkman is still an ignorant, irresponsible and passive adolescent. To mature, he must be initiated in the African American community. The bobcat hunt for which the older men invite him serves this purpose: ‘a male initiation rite at the hands of the elders and wise men of African tribal cultures.’7

During the hunt, Milkman undergoes rapid change. He realizes that Calvin’s lamp prevents his eyes from adjusting to the dark and so he abandons the artificial light and begins to see what the night holds by penetrating the darkness with his naked eyes. Then he is able to hear the wailing from the Ryna’s Gulch – Ryna was his great grandmother who was abandoned by her husband Solomon and so went mad with sorrow. He also listens to the dogs and men signalling each other and realizes that human beings are not separate but part of the nature. As a result, otherizing and objectifying nature (as ‘land’ is objectified in real estate business) and by extension, otherizing and objectifying other people (as Macon and Milkman have done in case of poor men and all women in their life) is not possible. Man can live happily only in harmony with the nature and other people. This realization makes him ready to confront his physical limitations as well as to heal his spiritual brokenness. Because of his limp, he is not able to keep up with other hunters. Physical fatigue overtakes him and he rests under a tree, while resting, he re-evaluates all his life – he accepts his hereto forth alienating self-centeredness and also the future responsibility for sharing both the joys and sorrows of his family and friends. It is at this moment that Guitar attempts to murder him. However, his newly developed sixth sense works him of Guitar’s approach. ‘He tried to listen with his fingertips, to hear what if anything, the earth had to say and it told him quickly that someone was standing behind him and he had just enough time to raise one hand to his neck and catch the wire that fastened around his throat.’ (279) Though Milkman survives physically, metaphorically his old selfish self is dead. With his spiritual rebirth he finds that even his physical limp is gone. He is truly integrated with the community of hunters. They offer him the ‘heart’ of bobcat, metaphorically meaning the ability to empathise with others. With Milkman’s change of heart, his behaviour also changes. Earlier, Milkman had devalued Hagar’s love and had used her as a sexual object. But now his love making with Sweet (even though she is a prostitute) is mutual and redemptive. There is no objectification here, only respectful caring for each other.

He soaped and rubbed her until his skin squeaked and glistered like any she put salve on his face. He washed his hair. She sprinkled talcum on his feet. He straddled her behind and massaged her back. She put witch hazel on his swollen neck. He made up the bed. She gave him gumbo to eat. He washed the dishes. She washed his clothes and hung them out to dry. He scoured her tub. She ironed his shirt and pants. He gave her fifty dollars. She kissed his mouth. He touched her face. She said please come back. He said I’ll see you tonight. (285)

By now, Milkman has consciously accepted the aim of his journey is to discover his roots and not the gold. Now he no longer wants to escape his family but rather to embrace it. So, he goes on and meets a local Indian Woman Susan Byrd, who turns out to be the niece of his grandmother sing. Susan tells him what she knew about sing. Her real name was Singing Bird. Her mother Heddy was a Red Indian who raised a black boy, Jake. Sing and Jake grew up together and later ran away together to get married. Nobody knew where they went. From Susan’s account and by deciphering the ‘Solomon Song’ as Milkman heard children sing, he learns that Solomon belonged to a flying African tribe. He and his wife Ryna had twenty-one children all boys, Jake being the youngest. Then one day all of a sudden, Solomon leapt in the air with baby Jake to fly away to his ancestral home in Africa. He left Ryna behind. So overcome with grief, she cried for days and days and lost her mind. Unfortunately, baby Jake slipped from Solomon’s hand and fell on the ground. Then Heddy took him and raised him up like a son. Milkman also finds that there are real places known as Solomon’s leap and Ryna’s Gulch and their story is immortalized in the children’s song. This is the same song that Pilate used to sing with a slight change – ‘Sugarman’ instead of ‘Solomon’

O Sugarman done fly away

Sugarman done gone

Sugarman cut across the sky

Sugarman gone home…

The names of Solomon, Jake, Ryna and others now make sense. Now Milkman has discovered his ancestry and with it his own identity. Now he views himself as a member of the larger African American community Catherine Lee comments, ‘Gone is his failure to attach to place. Now he has roots in every place that Pilate, his father and his grandparents have lived. He shares that heritage.’8

Dr Manisha Patil

Thursday, 29 June 2023

Postcolonialism - Dr Manisha Patil

Postcolonialism

Colonialism

The entire history of the civilized world is in a sense the history of colonization. Colonization means the dominance of a strong nation over a weaker one. Colonialism happens when a strong nation sees that its material interest and affluence require that it expand outside its borders. Colonialism is the acquisition of the colonialist, by brute force, of extra markets, extra resources of raw material and manpower from the colonies. Since the ancient times wars are being fought to conquer lands and people. The conquerors have written the history praising their individual valor and cultural superiority and condemned the conquered as savages in need of control. While constructing this false textual discourse the conquerors have ignored their own atrocities against the larger humanity. For instance, the great ancient civilizations like Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians had open slavery. During the Middle Ages, crusades were fought in the name of religion but undoubtedly their main cause was material gain. In the modern era, we saw the full-fledged European colonization of the world which by the 1930s covered almost 84.6 per cent of total land surface. However what marks off modern European colonization from the earlier colonizations is not just its geographical sweep but more than that its rationalist mode. In modern colonization, power changed its style – in place of the earlier ‘bandit mode’ which was more violent but nonetheless transparent in its self-interest, greed and rapacity, the new rationalist mode ‘was pioneered by rationalists, modernists and liberals who argued that imperialism was really the messianic harbinger of civilization to the uncivilized world.’1 The white European male colonialist, while plundering the natives and territories of the colonies, fully convinced himself that he stands on high moral grounds. His basic assumptions in defense of his actions were:

• The colonized are savages in need of education and rehabilitation

• The culture of the colonized is not up to the standard of the colonizer, and it’s the moral duty of the colonizer to do something about polishing it.

• The colonized nation is unable to manage and run itself properly, and thus it needs the wisdom and expertise of the colonizer.

• The colonized nation embraces a set of religious beliefs incongruent and incompatible with those of the colonizer, and consequently, it is God’s given duty of the colonizer to bring those stray people to the right path.

• The colonized people pose dangerous threat to themselves and to the civilized world if left alone; and thus, it is in the interest of the civilized world to bring those people under control.

The white European male systematically developed a colonial discourse which cuts across all the disciplines – science, mathematics, history, geography, literature, anthropology etc. – to develop an imperial mind set. He constructed his ‘self’ as a rationalist human (the famous quote of Descartes goes: ‘I think therefore I am’) capable of taking up new challenges, solving nature’s mysteries and on the account of his superior knowledge and cognitive faculties destined to rule the entire world. Then he developed an imperial ideology which worked at various levels. First of all, he attempted to degrade and then systematically wipe out the local languages and impose the language of colonizer. Then he degraded the local cultures including local religion, literature and even race. Then came mapping the territory – acquiring total knowledge of the landscape (including its people) and using that knowledge to control the territory. Unlike the earlier conquerors, say Alexander the Great who set out to win the world without knowing it, modern European conquerors first acquired the knowledge of their colonies and only then ventured to capture actual political power. Finally, they brought about textual reinforcement of the territorial possession by writing about the colonized land and people justifying their subjugation as mutually beneficial to both colonizer and colonized. In other words, the white Europeans adventurously penetrated into the so-called underdeveloped countries in Africa and Asia and new worlds of America and Australia, dominated the land and subjugated the natives, imposing their will at large on them. They eroded the natives’ cultures and languages, plundered the natives’ wealth and established their orders based on settlers’ supremacy

Dr Manisha Patil

Tuesday, 27 June 2023

Spiritual Power of African American Woman

Dr Manisha Patil

In Song of Solomon, Morrison denounces the destructive, materialistic, individualism which is the hallmark of white American patriarchy and which has also filtered in the psyche of African American men. Instead, she celebrates constructive, community centered spiritualism of African American people epitomized in one single woman – Pilate. ‘Born without a navel, Pilate is the ancestor, an “original” first mother who like the African woman in Tar Baby who holds eggs aloft in a Parisian market, offers eggs to Milkman and Guitar. She is the ancestral mother whose contact with the natural world has remained unbroken and whom her off springs deny at their peril. With blueberry lips constantly chewing seeds and pine kernels, Pilate is surrounded both by natural food and by the relics of her past carried in the green sack of bones [of her father’s bones] and the ear-ring containing the paper on which her father had written her name. Both are relics which affirm her identity and connectedness with ancestral dead. Unmindful of possessions, her spirituality gives her unquestioning acceptance of an otherworld reality.’18

John Duvell calls her ‘female Huck Finn’19 and Robert James Butter notes that Pilate is ‘one of the very few women in American literature capable of leading the picaresque life w is given so easily to the male protagonists of our literary traditions.’20 Her Birth on her own, after the death of her mother and her father’s choice of the name Pilate (name of the man that killed Jesus) as an act of rebellion, his retaliation against God for what he perceives as a cosmic injustice, mark Pilate different from other African American women. Further on, her lack of navel prevents her from getting married and socialized as subordinate to her man. Her constant wandering from place to place and her continuous rejection by larger African American communities, make her rethink about the accepted notions of sexuality, morality and community. She ‘cuts her hair signalling a repression of her sexuality since that is what has caused her the most trouble’ and ‘establishes a woman-centred alternative community that consistently operates without regard for middle-class conventions or the expectations of men.’ Utterly indifferent to possessions, she spiritually nurtures the people. ‘She has conjure powers and potions, can defeat apparently physically stronger men and can also make tools of the police.’21 Through her posthumous communication with her father, Pilate also becomes a link between past and present, living and dead. Her song contains the oral history of her family. Her bag of bones which she calls her ‘inheritance’, testifies her abidance to her father’s commandment: “You just can’t fly on off and leave a body.” (332) She does not know that the bones she carries are of her father but she does know her responsibilities. Throughout her life, she functions as a kind of ‘pilot’, teacher and godmother to Milkman. She is responsible not only for his birth (She made Ruth conceive from Macon with her root medicine) but also for his life. Her spirituality provides Milkman with an alternative to Macon’s materialism. ‘Pilate prevents Milkman from seeking flight from his responsibilities, from perpetuating the history of neglect. Milkman eventually learns to sympathize with the painful conditions of women he is related to: that of being left behind (Ryna), mistreated (Ruth), controlled (his sisters) and devalued (Hagar).’22 The punishment that Pilate gives him (knocking him down in the cellar for Hagar’s death), makes him rethink his excitement over flying. He realizes that the joy of flying away is exceeded by the pain of those left behind. ‘He had hurt her, left her and now she was dead he was certain of it. He had left her while he dreamt of flying, Hagar was dying. Sweet’s silvery voice came back to him: “Who’d he leave behind?” He left Ryna behind and twenty-one children. Twenty-one since he dropped the one he tried to take with him and Ryna had thrown herself all over the ground, lost her mind and was still crying in a ditch. Who looked after those twenty children? Jesus Christ, he left twenty-one children!’ (332) He repents his past mistakes, gives up materialism completely and accepts responsibility for his actions. ‘When he went home that evening, he walked into the house on Not Doctor Street with almost none of the things led taken with him. But he returned with a box of Hagar’s hair.’ (334) He also realizes that it is his responsibility to take Pilate to Solomon’s leap and make her bury her father’s bones there. So accordingly, he performs his duty. Unfortunately, twisted love of Guitar makes him attack the very people he wants to protect and he fires the bullet that kills Pilate instead of Milkman. Even on her deathbed, Pilate is not bitter. She still thinks of wellbeing of others. ‘She sighed. “Watch Reba for me”. And then Ì wish I’d a knowed more people. I would a loved all. It I’d a knowed more, I would a loved more.’ (336) Pilate’s dying words mark her as a total antithesis to the Seven Days. Seven Days claimed to love African American people but their love made them kill not only whites but also blacks. ‘Christ-killing’ Pilate, on the other hand, became the Christ figure who taught people to love even their enemy. In Pilate’s selfless loving, all other forms of selfish love stand exposed and Milkman realizes: ‘Why he loved her so. Without ever leaving the ground, she could fly.’ (336) Thus, finally Milkman gains the spiritual wisdom of Pilate by knowing that one can attain freedom only by fulfilling one’s responsibilities and one can become fully individual only by attaching to one’s family, ancestry and community as a whole.

Dr Manisha Patil

Monday, 26 June 2023

Tar Baby

Dr Manisha Patil

In her article Periodizing Toni Morrison’s Work from The Bluest Eye to Jazz: The Importance of Tar Baby, Malin Walther Pereira proposes that taking colonization as the central concern throughout her work, Morrison’s entire work can be divided into two categories – early and later. Her early work struggles with the effects of colonization on African American individuals and the community while her later work moves into an exploration of decolonized African American culture and history. In this context, her fourth novel Tar Baby assumes a rich significance. Understanding the importance of Tar Baby to Morrison’s distancing from the colonizing effects of Euro-American culture is central to understanding how the novel divides her early and later works.

Morrison’s first four books, The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, and Tar Baby, constitute Morrison’s struggle with colonization, both for her characters and their communities, as well as in her own writing. We can see this pattern in the dialogical way in which Morrison frames her early novels: The Bluest Eye is framed with a deconstructive dialogue with the Dick and Jane children’s books; Sula, with the Bible; Song of Solomon, with the American capitalist success myth. With Tar Baby’s explicit identification of colonization as a central issue, Morrison finally breaks free from the need to focus primarily on white ideas, aesthetic or otherwise; following Tar Baby, Morrison begins publishing a trilogy, of which we now have seen Beloved and Jazz published, a trilogy focused on black history and written primarily within an African American cultural perspective. In contrast to the concern with white frames in the early novels, both Beloved and Jazz take as their frames historically documented events in black lives: Beloved, on the case of Margaret Garner; Jazz, on a photo taken by James Van Der Zee that appears in The Harlem Book of the Dead.1

Dr Manisha Patil

Sunday, 25 June 2023

Dr. Seth is on a cycle yatra across the country

Respected Sir,

Hope you are doing well!

I am writing to you on behalf of Dr. Kiran Seth, founder, SPIC MACAY( padma shri awardee).

Dr. Seth is on a cycle yatra across the country

, to promote and preserve our heritage and spread Mahatma Gandhi’s message of simple thinking and high living and is reaching Mumbai during 6th to 9th July 2023.

We seek your support in spreading our heritage and it would be great if we have have a meeting with you and Dr. Seth during his yatra to Mumbai between 6-9 th July,

and also introduce us and help to meet some key people in finance, media and govt with Dr. Seth, who can support the movement.

We invite you as a very special guest for our All-Mumbai Regional Meet on 9th July 2023 at 3 PM at NITIE College, Powai, Mumbai.

We would be grateful if you accept our invitation for the same and join us for this meet.

With Warm Regards,

Sabyasachi Dey,

National Secretary,

SPIC MACAY,

Contact - 8108098246

African American Male Chauvinism: Song of Solomon

African American Male Chauvinism

Dr Manisha Patil

Milkman’s trip south to Shalimar, to the liberating discovery of family and past parallels Solomon’s return to Africa, to origins and to freedom. Yet when we celebrate Milkman’s and Solomon’s return to roots, we forget that it is nothing but the escapist male individualism. Both Solomon and Milkman leave their female counterparts Ryna and Hagar to grieve and to die broken hearted. Gurleen Grewal rightly points out that, ‘Women’s subjection, their lack of control over their own lives is the subtext of Song of Solomon.’9

Unlike her first two novels, Song of Solomon intensely foregrounds the process of identity formation in the novel’s hero (Milkman) on decidedly male grounds similarly both the title of the novel (Song of Solomon) and its one ward dedication (“Daddy”) emphasize the male genealogy. In both the processes, females, femininity and female genealogy are push to the margins. We can even go one step ahead and say that the novel, in fact, exposes the way in which the male identity and ideology are actually formed by exercising male control over women.

John Duvell, at length discusses how women are controlled by men. For this purpose, he deciphers the metaphors of doe-hunt and pea/e cock and puts the philosophy of seven Days under magnifying glass for minute analysis. When Milkman strikes Macon for hitting Ruth and comes to Guitar for comfort, Guitar’s sympathy takes the form of a brief narrative based on his hunting experience: “Anyway I stayed on the trail until I saw some bushes. The light was good and all of a sudden, I saw a rump between the branches. I dropped it with the first shot and finished it with the next. I want to tell you I was feeling good. I saw myself showing my uncles what I’d caught. But when I got up to it – and I was going real slow because I thought I right have to shoot it again – I saw it was a doe […] I felt…bad. You know what I mean? I killed a doe. A doe, man […] So I know how you felt when you saw your father hit your mother. It’s like that doe. A man shouldn’t do that. You couldn’t help what you felt.” (85) Here killing a doe metaphorically suggests hurting on African American women. In Guitar’s Realization that Milkman doesn’t grasp the metaphor (“Chances were Milkman didn’t even know what a doe was” [86]), there seems a kind of why inter textual gloss that calls into question the efficacy of the metaphor, a metaphor that suggests that the female’s safety depends upon the honour of good male hunters. In particular, Guitar’s metaphor shed a different light on his membership in the seven days and his work of hunting and killing white people.10

Another metaphor is that of pea/e cock. Several men in the novel pee on women literally and metaphorically. Chronologically speaking, the first person who is shown peeing is again Macon. When Macon discovered the gold of the old white man he had presumably killed in the cave he ‘like a burglar out on his first jet stood up to pee.’ (170) This moment anticipated the shift in relationship between Macon and Pilate. Macon waited to take gold as a compensation for the loss of their farm. Pilate on the other hand viewed this action as theft. Both were adamant on their stands and it created the permanent animosity between them. Then onwards Macon always misjudged Pilate. “That Woman’s no good. She’s a snake and can charm you like a snake, but still a snake.” (54)

Still a little boy, Milkman wets on his sister Lena during one of their Sunday car rides. This makes Lena cry. Almost twenty-five years later, Lena recalls the same moment for Milkman and turns it into a metaphor for the thoughtless way he has treated the women of the family, since ‘there are all kinds of ways to pee on people.’ (214) Lena gives a totally different perspective on Milkman’s protection of Ruth from Macon: “You are exactly like him […] You think because you hit him once that we all believe you were protecting [our mother]. Taking her side. It’s a lie. You were taking over, letting us know you had the right to tell her and all of us what to do.” (215-6) Thus if for Guitar, Milkman was protecting the doe, for Lena he was still hunting the doe. Lena questions the authority of Milkman, “Where do you get the right to decide our lives?” She herself answers the question, “I’ll tell you where. From that hog’s get that hangs down between your legs.” (215) Here Lena points out not just Milkman’s literal phallus but also his patriarchal privilege which allows him to control and select the sexuality of ‘his’ women. Though Milkman has the legitimate reason for his objection to Corinthians-Porter relationship (Porter being a member of Seven Days), he does not disclose it to Corinthians; rather he tells his father, aligning himself with the authority of the father. Macon, too, does not know about the Seven Days, but objects because Porter is his social interior.

Porter, too, is not behind in peeing on women. On the other hand, his peeing is the most spectacular in the novel. ‘Standing in the window of his attic apartment (an apartment Macon owns) the drunken Porter threatens suicide. His drunker shorts turn from a demand that the crowd of women “Send me up somebody to fuck” (25) to his assertion that “I love ya! I love ya all” (26). Between the former and the latter Porter “leaned his shotgun on the window sill, pulled out his penis and in a high arch, peed over the heads of the women, making them screen and run in a panic that the shotgun had not been able to create.” (25) Porter’s mixed messages – one of self-interest, the other suggesting altruism – take on special significance when we recall that this attempted suicide results from his work as a member of Seven Days. His ambivalent utterances, spoken in drunkenness reveal the ideological fraternity of Porter, Macon, Milkman and Guitar; despite differences of class and political perspective, each acts on the assumption of male privilege that is grounded in the possession of women. Moreover, Porter’s assertion to the women below that “I love ya” cast an odd light on Guitar’s insistence that his killing of whites is motivated purely by love of African American people.’11

Coming to the Seven Days, it is an underground organization which avenges the injustices done to the African American people. Guitar tells Milkman,

“When a Negro child, Negro woman or Negro man is killed by whites and nothing is done about it by their law and their courts, this society selects a similar victim at random and they execute him or her in a similar manner if they can. If the Negro was hanged, they hand; if a Negro was burnt, they burn; raped and murdered, they rape and murder.” (154-55)

Lynching of black men has a long history in America. It is motivated by two reasons – economic and sexual. If a black man prospers economically and thus exceeds his limit, he is eliminated all together. (e.g., Macon I) Similarly, if he becomes too bold and crosses the racial line by showing an interest in a white woman, he is squarely put into his place. The cases of lynching increased after World War I, because black American soldiers experienced a radically less segregated world in Europe (especially France) where white women were available to them sexually. Not surprising they carried the same attitude back home in America. But in America they met a different late. Among many examples, the two Guitar mentions (but leaves the sexual dimension unsaid) include a man castrated and the other blinded because white American males perceived a threat to their possession of white women. John Duvell comments,

The white males responsible for the violence against African American men were sending a particular message – one form of miscegenation, African American men and white women would not be tolerated.

Tellingly, the kinds of crimes the Days average include a number that involve sexual possession, such as the rape of an African American woman by a white man of the lynching of an African American man for his interest in a white woman.12

To give weight to Guitar’s anger and to show that the Seven Days are the reaction to the institutionalized racism in America, Morrison mentions the historical figure Emmett Till. Till, a black teenager from Chicago was murdered in Mississippi by three white men for whistling at a white woman and the three men were acquitted by an all-white jury. Commenting on this historical (not fictional) case, Guitar notes, “Ain’t no law for no colored man except the one sends him to the chair.” (82) Even after emancipation, the blacks do not have the full right to citizenship. They are still discriminated against overtly and covertly. In fact, the Jim Crow laws make the word emancipation itself meaningless. Guitar is so much perplexed by this situation that he views the African American man as ‘the supreme marginal figure; silenced not only by whites but undermined and unmanned even by African American women.’13 Guitar says,

“Everybody wants the life of a black man. Everybody, white men want us dead or quiet – which is the same thing as dead. White women, same thing. They want us, you know, universal’, human, no ‘race consciousness’. Tame, except in bed. They like a little racial loin cloth in the bed. But outside the bed they want us to be individuals. You tell them, ‘But they lynched my papa’, and they say, ‘Yeah, but you’re better than the lynchers are, so forget it.’ and black women they want your whole self. Love, they call it and understanding ‘why don’t you understand me?’ What they mean is, Don’t love anything on earth except me…They won’t even let you risk your own life – unless it’s over them. What good is man’s life if he can’t even choose what to die for?” (222-3)

Paradoxically, Guitar chooses to die for the love of African American women (and African American race as a whole). However, his whole idea of love is so twisted that for him loving is killing. All the Seven Days (including Smith) have the same delusion. Milkman (who loves nobody else other than himself) is able to penetrate this delusion. He asks Guitar, “[E]xcept for skin color, I can’t tell the difference between what the white women want from us and what the colored women want. You say they all want our life, our living life. So, if a colored woman is raped and killed, why do the Days rape and kill a white woman? Why worry about the colored woman at all?” Guitar answers, “Because she is mine.” Once again John Duvell’s comments are worth quoting:

As the chief spokesman for the Seven Days, Guitar here makes it abundantly clear that all the Days, not just Porter, pee on women, particularly African American women. In his response we see the issue of race bracketed momentarily and instead discover what is really at issue – male possession of women. Thus, the Seven Day’s ‘heroic’ stance on saving the African American race parallels Milkman’s ‘defence’ of his mother. Both are about males staking claim to women-as-property, so that we might say that the rule of Milkman in the family or of the Days in society is one and the same perpetuation of patriarchal authority, pea/e-cock power.

The Seven Days epitomizes patriarchal organization… [and excels] in its unarticulated effort to establish masculinity as violent mastery and manhood as the right to say what one’s women do. African American male violence does not simply imitate male violence. The former self-consciously imitate the later. Thus, the unrecognized mission of the Seven Days seems to be the following: if white male violence works to keep African American men from white women then African American men need to organize to insure continued property rights in African American women.14

Michael Rothberg also agrees with Duvell, on the point of imitation. He says,

Morrison’s critique of racial revenge is very clear: while the Seven Days seem to work outside the dominant system, the group’s emphasis on ‘ratio’ and ‘reason’ represent not an alternative but a mimesis of the system’s instrumental logic. The attempt to exist outside or below the surface of everyday life merely reproduces what it seeks to undermine. The price for such mimetic calculation is the breakdown suffered by Smith and others in the group and the escalation of violence within the black community, indicated by the fratricidal turn of Guitar and Milkman’s friendship and the calculated violence of Hagar’s ultimately self-destructive pursuit of Milkman. the novel suggests that conspirational politics w takes their impetus from traumas rendered to the black community end by repeating those traumas in ever more ghastly scenarios of acting out.15

The result of this complex phenomenon is again the double colonization of African American women. They have to suffer twice – first as blacks and secondly as women. We have already seen the plight of Ruth. The condition of her daughters is no better. Their father always treated them as the decorative articles. They were provided with all the material comforts but emotionally they were starved. Macon and Ruth could never provide them with emotional support. They were also not allowed to develop intimate friendship with other children because Macon considered it to be below his dignity. Lena tells Milkman “When we were little girls, before you were born, he took us to the ice-house once. Drove us there in his Hudson. We were all dressed up and we stood there in front of those sweating black men, sucking ice out of our hands’ chiefs, leaning forward a little so as not to drip water on our dresses. There were other children there. Barefoot naked to the waist, dirty. But we stood apart, near the car, in white stockings, ribbons and gloves and when he talked to the men, he kept glancing at us, us and the car. The car and us. You see, he took us there so they could see us, envy us envy him. Then one of the little boys came over to us and put his hand on Corinthians’ hair. She offered him her piece of ice and before we knew it, he was running toward us. He knocked the ice out of her hand into the dirt and shoved us both into the car. First he displayed us then he splayed us. All our lives were like that: he would parade us like virgins through Babylon, then humiliate us like whores in Babylon.” (216) Lena did not go to college because she was afraid for her mother and wanted to protect her at home. Corinthians went to college: ‘Her education had taught her how to be an enlightened mother and wife, able to contribute to the civilization – or in her case, the civilizing – of her community.’ (188) But the things she required were totally different from what she was taught. ‘[S]he had no real skills. Bryn Maws had done what a four year dose of liberal education was designed to do: unfit her for eighty per cent of the useful work of the world. First by training her for leisure, enrichments and domestic mindlessness: Second, by clear implication that she was too good for such work.’ (189) Ruth had high expectations from both of them. She wanted them to marry doctors. But there were no suitable doctors. Then there were other professional men of colour – teachers, lawyers, mortician and even post office workers – but Lena and Corinthians were not suitable for them because they were a little too elegant. Thus, it turned out to be that they did not marry anybody. As young girls, they had started making rose petals as a way of passing time and even in their forties, they were wasting time by making rose petals. When at the age of forty-two, Corinthians realized her condition she suffered a severe depression. To come out of it, she decided to find a job. Then came the second realization (and shock) – that twenty-one years cut off from the world of the work had made her unemployable for any professional job. However, so intense was her need to be independent that finally she became a maid. ‘After graduation she returned to a work world in which colored girls, regardless of their background, were in demand for one and only one kind of work. And by 1963, Corinthians’ main concern was simply that her family not know that she had been doing it for two years.’ (189) Her job also gave her an opportunity to develop a relationship with a man – unfortunately he was Porter (one of the Seven Days). Porter wants her to give up her role of ‘a doll baby’ (196) and become a grown-up woman. What he really means is Corinthians should accept his authority instead of her father’s. In return, he promises her ‘love’ instead of the costly gifts of her father. (We have already seen that the Seven Day’s philosophy of love is destructive rather than constructive). Fortunately, (or unfortunately) Milkman comes to know about this affair and with his father’s assistance puts an end to it. Thus, Corinthians is controlled economically, sexually and as a result even mentally by all the men in her life – Macon (father), Milkman (brother), and Porter (lover). All three men are joined by the moments of urination (peeing on people).

Condition of Hagar (Pilate’s granddaughter) is even worse. Five years elder to Milkman, beautiful and whimsical, Hagar again is provided with all the material comforts but starved emotionally. Pilate and Reba were poor but they fulfilled each and every wish of Hagar because ‘all they knew to do was love her.’ (307) They sacrificed their whole selves for their ‘baby girl’ (319) but failed to develop self-worth in her. Cut off from the larger African American community and her roots in the rural South, her life was spiritually as barren as that of Milkman (before his trip south). ‘Her spiritual emptiness – “She had no self-left” (137) – is ironically balanced by her vast sense of entitlement: She believes that Milkman must love her simply because she loves him. Her feeling of entitlement is a result of Pilate and Reba’s enmeshment, their eagerness to give her everything.’16 In turn, Hager too eagerly gave her whole self to Milkman. Not just sexually but psychologically, Milkman became indispensable for her. However, its effect on Milkman was opposite. ‘It was so free, so abundant; it had lost its fervour…She [Hagar] was the third beer. Not the first one, which the throat receives with almost tearful gratitude; or the second that confirms and extends the pleasure of the first. But the third, the one you drink because it’s there, because, it can’t hurt and because what difference does it make?’ (91) By comparing her with beer Milkman devalued her just like his father devalued his sisters by comparing them with car. But Lena and Corinthians, at least tried to free themselves from the male control. For Hagar, that was unthinkable. When Milkman abandoned her, she tried to kill him. But she got trapped in a circular puzzle – she wanted to kill Milkman so that he would leave her for ever. There seemed to be no way out for Hagar. In her last desperate, attempt to win Milkman’s heart again, she fell prey to the American consumerism – she purchased all the fashionable products which promised to alter her body and to make her desirable. (In The Bluest Eye, Pecola is also the victim of same delusion – blue eyes will make her desirable by other people) However, she soon realized that outer materials cannot fill the inner void. ‘Because she can only love herself in the reflected light of Milkman’s false love, Hagar’s world is suddenly turned upside down and her love mutates into an impotent rage that rules her body and soul. After Milkman leaves town in search of tabled family gold, Hagar focuses her love-turned-hatred upon her and soon spirals into bottomless sadness.’17 Ultimately Hagar meets Ryna’s fate: ‘While [Milkman] dreamt of flying, Hagar was dying.’ (332) History is repeated once again. African American male chauvinism, reflected in Macon’s materialism, Seven Day’s philosophy of love and Milkman’s dream of flying like Solomon, has ultimately resulted in the objectification, devaluation and untimely death of African American woman.

Dr Manisha Patil

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