Trapping: Tar Baby

 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 

Select Bibliography : Toni Literature

 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 

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

Ugc new guideline for Assistant professor

 

PhD is optional qualification for Assistant professor

 

Rejection versus Appropriation: Tar Baby

 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 

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