Toni Morrison passed away on August 5, 2019, and as I sit down to write my tribute to one of my favorite authors, I remember how her powerful voice impacted upon me and particularly upon the group of graduate students whom I taught two of her best works, The Bluest Eye and Beloved, the second made into an equally good film in 1998, starring an actor as big as Oprah Winfrey in Sethe’s role. Needless to say, Morrison was a powerful voice, a voice that time and again, in all her fictional works, rang out against all forms of oppression in the American society but not limited to them only. So, in the early 1990s, as I read through The Bluest Eye and Beloved with my students, I noticed their eyes widened as they slowly came to understand many socio-cultural and racial issues, which had been too vague previously, and they realized the importance of a powerful voice in a world too full of silences in places where voices need to be heard.
White literary circles had, initially, not been willing to recognize Morrison as anyone but an African female writer who couldn’t rise above her “black” experience. In 1973, she was undermined by feminist writer Sara Blackburn who, while reviewing Sula, saw Morrison only as a “recorder” of the black side of provincial American life, and advised her to address larger issues or remain forever a black woman writer. She was frequently asked why she marginalized the white experience in her works, but Morrison did not change her position. She answered back by saying that she did not think writing about black people is not “real writing” and that it was necessary for black writers to engage with white characters or the white world in order for their writing to be legitimate. She also commented that such questions were themselves racist and no white author would ever be asked why she marginalized the black experience. Morrison steadily moved on to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993 and she never once shifted her focus from the black experience.
Her family, her education and particularly, her long career from 1967 to 1983 as Editor with Random House in New York may have contributed significantly to the person and writer she eventually became. Morrison grew up in the small town of Lorain, Ohio, in a lively household surrounded by songs, fairytales, ghost stories, myths, music and the language of their African-American heritage. Her work at Random House brought her into association with writers and activists like Toni Cade Bambara, Gayl Jones, Angela Davis and Muhammad Ali. In 2013, in a conversation with Pulitzer Prize winner Junot Diaz she mentioned that she had the opportunity to observe how sloppily the works of African-American authors were being edited in those days and how little anyone cared! Little efforts were made to collect their works, so she had to go out of her way to do so. Also, New York, back then, was a hub of political activity, with the ongoing Civil Rights Movement. This gave Morrison a view, so to say, into “Black America” from the “inside” and she concluded that racism is simply a social construct, created by the few, for the benefit of the few.
The seeds of The Bluest Eye (1970) may have been planted in the early 1960s when she had joined a small writer’s group, where for discussion each member had to bring in a story or a poem. Morrison wrote her story, based on a girl she knew in school who prayed to god for blue eyes! She later developed this story and we had The Bluest Eye. As is well known, it is the story of Pecola, a young Afro-American girl who has just stepped into womanhood and like many other girls her age, she dreams of being beautiful and of being loved and of having a baby. What’s wrong with that? Nothing, except that in her case she feels she must have the bluest eyes! Why? Because in the dominant discourse, blue is beautiful, blonde is beautiful, white is beautiful, and all the cultural and political institutions work to reinforce this [mis]belief. Pecola is considered ugly and she too considers herself ugly because she has submitted totally to the dominant discourse. We might note here that the “Black is Beautiful” cultural movement was on at this time, and our knowledge of its core issues helps us to understand how Pecola is finally devastated, physically and psychologically. Raped by her father, she sinks into insanity. The narrative center here is the African-American experience. The most important question to be asked here is: whose failure is it?
To answer that, let us go back to the beginning of the book, where Claudia MacTeer observes, “There is really nothing more to say—except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.” To me, the core of the novel lies here, in these lines. Let us look at Cholly Breedlove, the man, the father who rapes his daughter (Pecola), but before the judgmental finger is pointed at him, let us rewind to where he, as an adolescent, was brutally dehumanized by two grown-up white males. When a person spends his lifetime being made to feel that he is nothing but an animal, then it is difficult for him to reclaim his human self at any point, which is what happens to Cholly. Cholly, the man, is forever broken, as was Halle in Beloved when he helplessly watched his wife Sethe being brutalized by the Master and his sons. Cholly reminds the African-American reader (and any other reader who belongs to a group that has been oppressed and subordinated in the past) how heavy the chains of the past are and how difficult it is to throw off that burden.
Brutality and rape are often sensationalized by authors to attract readers and spur on sales but that is not the route Toni Morrison takes. Nor is she cashing in on other slave narratives to depict what has already been depicted many times over. What she is doing here is addressing the African-American readers and asking them to interrogate themselves: who is responsible for Pecola’s condition? Who “created” Cholly? Noteworthy, the two white men who had broken Cholly’s manhood have disappeared; they are no longer seen or heard of again. That is because the social power structure has exonerated them on account of their skin color. Do they have any burdens to bear? Do predators suffer from guilt conscience, individually or collectively? These are important questions for all of us, more so today. Morrison states in the foreword to this novel, “Black is beautiful! Blue eyes in a black face make you look like a freak.” So the African-American community has to identify its own weaknesses and strengths, and work to create its own identity and space. Achebe had engaged the Africans in Things Fall Apart, pointing out to them their rich culture, asking them to examine what they did to themselves in the past to fall to where they had! What are they doing to themselves now? The African community has to find the answer to these questions, as does the African- American community of Morrison.
Beloved is about motherhood and a woman’s claim to her body, to every person’s claim to his/her body. It is extremely poignant, more so perhaps than The Bluest Eye. The Bluest Eye touches us to make us angry, angry that we are so helpless in “righting” so many wrongs, but Beloved is shockingly painful and evokes this feeling in all readers. Sethe, a slave, is abused and tortured by her Master and his sons while in her advanced stage of pregnancy because she had tried to escape to freedom. Further, they milk her, like a cow, and take the milk that is stored in her body for her child, to be used for the white children. After this extreme torture, she flees, flees until her feet are raw pulps of flesh. Later, her Master catches up with her and claims her back as his property. This time she revolts with violence. Based on the true story of a slave named Margaret Garner, Sethe does what Margaret Garner had done in real life—she tries to kill all her children, fails with the older ones, but succeeds with the baby. Why? Sethe will not let them be enslaved! The irony is that in committing this horrifying crime, Sethe has, for the first time, claimed her children as her own. The children had never belonged to her; they were the master’s property, to be sold like factory products. Female slaves bore children to different men; thus Baby Suggs had eight children from six different men. Neither Sethe nor Paul D. knew who their fathers were. So, for the first time, Sethe takes a decision about her children and ironically, in so doing, establishes that they are hers. This raises several questions valid till today: how far can a mother go to protect her children? Was Sethe right in what she did? Did she have the right to do what she did? And finally: what are a mother’s rights?
The movie Beloved has two very poignant scenes. The first is when Sethe collapses while she is running to freedom and she is helped to safety by a white girl, Denver, an indentured labor herself. Two devastated women, helping one another! But then, let us also remember that Denver is a representative of the same race that has reduced Sethe to her present condition. This may be taken as a sliver of hope for a new society. The second is when the dead baby [or its reincarnation] Beloved asks Denver (Sethe’s daughter, named after the white girl): “Tell me, Tell me, Tell me.” She wants to know Sethe’s story. “Tell me” comes through as a haunting refrain and simultaneously upholds the importance of resurrecting traumatic events of history embedded in people’s memories through oral narratives. It is important for Denver, Sethe’s daughter, to hear about her mother’s traumatic sufferings so that she can understand the racial trauma of her people which will enable her to reconstruct the future on stronger grounds and then to pass it on to Beloved.
Now, to go back to where I started. As I taught my graduate class this African-American Literature course at Jahangirnagar University and we read Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Beloved, I found my students raising questions about certain commonalities of experience between the characters and us. As South Asians we, too, have suffered colonization, segregation and oppression, and problems of race and identity still remain. The subcontinent has broken into three nations. The students felt the need to hear powerful literary voices like Morrison, addressing them, telling and retelling the story of their past. The effects of the past events continue into the present, and this generation would like to be connected to the past so they could understand it and shape the future.
Shireen Huq is Professor of English at the Department of English and Modern Languages at North South University.
