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Some Thoughts on the Mutual Displacements/Appropriations/Accommodations of Culture in Several Fictions by Toni Morrison, Cynthia Ozick, and Grace Paley
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 July 2009
Extract
In Playing in the Dark, Toni Morrison sets out to chart a new “geography” in literary criticism, to provide a “map” for locating what she calls the “Africanist” presence in the American literary tradition. The assumption of Americanist critics, she argues, has been that “traditional, canonical American literature is free of, uninformed, and unshaped by the fourhundred-year-old presence of, first, Africans and then, African Americans in the United States. It assumes that this presence — which shaped the body politic, the Constitution, and the entire history of the culture — has had no significant place or consequence in the origin and development of that culture's literature.” For Morrison, recording the Africanist presence produces nothing less than an absolute revision of our notion of what constitutes the American literary tradition.
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References
NOTES
1. Morrison, Toni, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 3–5Google Scholar; see also her “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature,” Michigan Quarterly Review 28 (1989): 1–34Google Scholar. The kind of radical rereading of the tradition that Morrison proposes has recently been realized by Fishkin, Shelley Fisher in relation to what may well be America's most classic text, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African American Voices (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993)Google Scholar; see also Sundquist, Eric, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).Google Scholar
2. Much of the criticism on Song of Solomon has focused on the novel's recovery of a black past which empowers contemporary African Americans to perpetuate their own cultural heritage. See, for example, Benston, Kimberly W., “I yam what I am: the topos of un(naming) in Afro-American Literature,” in Black Literature and Literary Theory, ed. Gates, Henry Louis Jr (New York: Methuen, 1984), 151–72Google Scholar, and Benston, , “Re-Weaving the ‘Ulysses Scene’: Enchantment, Post-Oedipal Identity, and the Buried Text of Blackness in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon,” in Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text, ed. Spillers, Hortense J. (New York: Routledge, 1991), 87–109Google Scholar; Campbell, Jane, Mythic Black Fiction: The Transformation of History (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1986)Google Scholar; Davis, Cynthia A., “Self, Society, and Myth in Toni Morrison's Fiction,” Contemporary Literary 23 (1982): 323–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lee, Dorothy H., “The Quest for Self: Triumph and Failure in the Works of Toni Morrison,” in Black Women Writers 1950–80: A Critical Evaluation, ed. Evans, Mari (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Doubleday, 1984), 346–60Google Scholar; Fabre, Genevieve, “Genealogical Archaeology, or the Quest for Legacy in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon,” in Critical Essays on Toni Morrison, ed. McKay, Nellie Y. (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1988), 105–14Google Scholar; Skerrett, Joseph T. Jr., “Recitation to the Griot: Storytelling and Learning in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon,” in Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition, ed. Pryse, Marjorie and Spillers, Hortense J. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 192–202Google Scholar; Smith, Valerie, Self-Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987)Google Scholar; Stryz, Jan, “Inscribing an Origin in Song of Solomon,” Studies in American Fiction 19 (1991): 31–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Willis, Susan, Specifying: Black Women Writing the American Experience (London: Routledge, 1990), 83–109.Google Scholar
3. Morrison, Toni, Song of Solomon (New York: Signet, 1977), pp. 333–34Google Scholar; hereafter cited in the text. Compare Benston, , “Re-Weaving the ‘Ulysses Scene’.”Google Scholar
4. References to the biblical text are to the standard King James version. Morrison is quite correct to object to the slighting of the implications of “black” in this passage. According to the Anchor Bible, commentators have consistently attempted to “mitigate the blackness” by retranslating the text (Song of Songs: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, ed. Pope, Marvin H. [Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1977], 307)Google Scholar. Pope's commentary on the connotations here of blackness go on for some time, covering, among others, Rashi and his problems with the passage, and including this fascinating passage:
In another connection, however, Rashi overcomes his melainophobia and goes to some trouble to demonstrate that black is beautiful. In Num. 12:1 Miriam and Aaron rebuked Moses for marrying a negroid (Cushite) woman. (The term Cushite is still used in modern Israeli Hebrew with derogatory and racist overtones. [I do not agree with this; quite the contrary, the term kushi is a term of endearment.] YHVH himself came to Moses's defense.… The divine reaction to Moses' choice seemed sufficient endorsement and Rashi concluded that “this teaches us that everyone acknowledged her beauty, just as everyone acknowledges the blackness of Cushites.… The unprejudiced rendering “black and beautiful” is understandably favored by persons who value their own blackness, real or imagined. The Black Jews of Harlem, the Commandment Keepers, under the leadership of Rabbi Wentworth A. Matthew who claims descent from Solomon and the Queen of Sheba [who is black], maintain that Ham and Shem were black, and only Japheth, ancestor of the Gentiles, was white. Jacob also was black because he had smoother skin. Solomon was black because he says so in Song of Songs 1:15 … ignoring the clear indication of the Hebrew that the speaker is feminine. (308–9)
Pope also discusses black Madonnas and black goddesses, among other things; but while he discusses “The Song of Songs and Women's Liberation,” he does not discuss the “Song” and African Americanism.
5. Campbell, Edward F. Jr, ed., Ruth: A New Translation with Introduction, Notes, and Commentary (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1975).Google Scholar
6. Morrison, Toni, Beloved (New York: Signet, 1987)Google Scholar; hereafter cited in the text.
7. Quoted in Clemons, Walter, “A Gravestone of Memories,” Newsweek, 09 28, 1987, 75Google Scholar. According to recent figures compiled by Klein, Herbert A. (The Middle Passage: Comparative Studies in the Atlantic Slave Trade [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978]CrossRefGoogle Scholar, based upon other work in the field by Philip Curtin, Morrison's number seems exaggerated. Of course, what do numbers matter, where human suffering is involved? And how can they not matter?
8. Henderson, Mae G., “Toni Morrison's Beloved: Re-membering the Body as Historical Text,”Google Scholar in Spillers, , Comparative American Identities, 64.Google Scholar
9. Gillespie, Marcia Anne, “Out of Slavery's Inferno,” Ms 16 (1987): 68Google Scholar. In “Aunt Medea,” first published in the Village Voice on October 19, 1987, Stanley Crouch notes the Holocaust reference contained in the number sixty million and calls the novel a “blackface holocaust novel,” which is, I think, rather to overstate the case (reprinted in Notes of a Hanging Judge: Essays and Reviews 1979–89 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990], 205).Google Scholar
10. Ozick, Cynthia, “The Shawl,” New Yorker 56 (05 26, 1980): 33–34Google Scholar; “Rosa,” New Yorker 59 (03 21, 1983): 38–71Google Scholar; and The Shawl (New York: Vintage, 1990)Google Scholar; quotations cited hereafter in the text — unless otherwise specified — from the 1990 edition.
11. I have discussed this at length in “Absence, Loss, and the Space of History in Toni Morrison's Beloved,” Arizona Quarterly 48 (1992): 117–38Google Scholar. This article forms a part of my Engendering Romance: Women Writers and the Hawthorne Tradition, 1850–1990 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994).Google Scholar
12. On the book's philosophical concern with counting, see, again, my essay on Beloved (“Absence, Loss, and the Space”).
13. On the historical bases of Beloved, see, Lerner, Gerda, ed. Black Women in White America: A Documentary History (New York: Vintage, 1973)Google Scholar; Harris, et al. , eds., The Black Book (New York: Random House, 1974)Google Scholar; Henderson, Mae, “Toni Morrison's Beloved?”Google Scholar; and Rushdy, Ashraf H. A., “Daughters Signifyin(g) History: The Example of Toni Morrison's Beloved,” American Literature 64 (1992): 567–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
14. Cheyette, Bryan, “Life after the Holocaust,” TLS (06 14, 1991): 26Google Scholar; and Ozick, Cynthia, “The Shawl” (letter), TLS (07 5, 1991): 13Google Scholar. In The Holocaust in Historical Context: The Holocaust and Mass Death before the Modern Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994)Google Scholar, Steven T. Katz discriminates the differences between the Holocaust and other large-scale human catastrophes (such as slavery, witch-hunts, and the extermination of the Indians), not to claim for the Holocaust superiority on the scale of human atrocities but to clarify its uniqueness.
15. Morrison, Toni, “Site of Memory,” in Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, ed. Zinsser, William (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 109Google Scholar, and her “Unspeakable Things Unspoken,” 7; Bernal, Martin, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987)Google Scholar; Pitts, Walter F., Old Ship of Zion: The Afro-Baptist Ritual in the African Disapora (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993)Google Scholar; and Stannard, David E., American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992)Google Scholar. To add complexity to complexity, I note, without having a clear idea what to make of it, that in Almanac of the Dead (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991)Google Scholar, published after both Ozick's stories and Morrison's novel, Leslie Marmon Silko records that “sixty million Native Americans died between 1500 and 1600. The defiance and resistance of things European continue unabated. The Indian Wars have never ended in the Americas. Native Americans acknowledge no border; they seek nothing less than the return of all tribal lands.” Early on in the book, she records a newspaper headline having to do with the “Middle East. There is killing everywhere. Jews and Arabs” (26).
16. What is fascinating about Guitar's account of Jewish Nazi hunters is that the dissimilarity it claims between the African American and Jewish situations is hardly what Guitar imagines it to be. Not only did the courts in Europe not try the majority of Nazi war criminals (and, when they did try them, the sentences were almost never commensurate with the crimes), but Jewish Nazi hunters, realizing this, set upon a course of action not so very different from that of the Seven Days. Not that the Jewish Nazi hunters set out to kill innocent people, but they did, on more than one occasion, take justice into their own hands; and they did conceive a plot (ultimately foiled by other Jews) to poison the drinking water in a major German city (Elkins, Michael, Forged in Fury [London: Corgi, 1971], 252–55).Google Scholar
17. Samuel Allen notes that “the Weimaraner dogs, Horst and Helmut, in the decaying house of the grandfather's murderers, suggest but fall short of the name of the Munich beer-drinking song” (Allen's untitled review in McKay, , Critical Essays, 31)Google Scholar. This might constitute another quasi-allusion to the Holocaust, reappropriated to the story of African American history. In this context, the name of the book's major protagonist and Christ figure, recalling the betrayal of Christ, may also be relevant. Although, as in Beloved, the novel intends a subversion of Christian culture, nonetheless, the name does recall the story of the Jewish role in the crucifixion of Christ.
18. Paley, Grace, Later the Same Day (Middlesex, England: Penguin, 1985), 203Google Scholar; cf. 185; hereafter cited in the text.