Song of Solomon

Song of Solomon
by Toni Morrison
read: 2014
Guardian 1000 Novels

The names in Song of Solomon stand out right away - Milkman, Guitar, First Corinthians, Macon Dead, Pilate - but while they sound nonsensical, there's a method to Toni Morrison's madness. The names African Americans have is distorted by slavery and oppression, as Malcolm X notes in the following conversation:

The protagonist's given name is "Macon Dead III," but he's called "Milkman," a nickname given to him by a neighbor who glimpsed him breastfeeding at the age of four. For most of the story, he doesn't know the origin of his name or the embarrassing implications. But "Macon Dead" is no better - it was given to Milkman's grandfather by a registry board, who asked for his place of origin ("Macon") and his father's occupation ("dead"), and erroneously filled them in the first and last name boxes. The first Macon Dead, originally named Jake, was encouraged to keep the new name by his wife Sing, herself having shortened her name from its original Indian name, Singing Bird. His last name is unknown, but his father was Solomon, whose name in corrupted form provides the town of Shalimar its name - or is it Solomon that's a corruption of Shalimar? The names characters have is a series of accidents and mis-steps, which reinforces the lack of identity African-Americans have in a world dominated by the white man.

Milkman's sisters are named based on random words in the Bible, as is his Aunt Pilate, who keeps her name (the only word her illiterate father ever wrote) folded up in a gold box dangling from her ear. It's not until late in the book that Milkman understands the power of names and why Pilate treasures hers so much:

How many dead lives and fading memories were buried in and beneath the names of the places in this country. Under the recorded names were other names, just as "Macon Dead," recorded for all time in some dusty file, hid from view the real names of people, places, and things. Names that had meaning. No wonder Pilate put hers in her ear. When you know your name, you should hang on to it, for unless it is noted down and remembered, it will die when you do.

Milkman doesn't own his name - his given name is washed away by his nickname, his family name was washed away by the bureaucrat's error, and undoubtedly his true African name was washed away by slavery. Because of this, he has no sense of who he is or where he came from, and during the final part of the book he realizes that this has more value than the gold he's seeking that could set him free financially.

The Bluest Eye

The Bluest Eye
by Toni Morrison
read: 2012
Guardian 1000 Novels

Toni Morrison wrote the following paragraph in the introduction to The Bluest Eye:

One problem was centering the weight of the novel's inquiry on so delicate and vulnerable a character could smash her and lead readers into the comfort of pitying her rather than into an interrogation of themselves for the smashing.  My solution - break the narrative into parts that had to be re-assembled by the reader - seemed to me a good idea, the execution of which does not satisfy me now.  Besides, it didn't work: many readers remain touched but not moved.

There are two things of interest to me here.  One is the notion that I as the reader should be interrogating myself for the "smashing" - which Morrison elsewhere in the introduction refers to as "psychological murder" - of major character Pecola, as her self-image and sanity are destroyed under the pressures of emotional, physical, and sexual abuse and the way society perceives her.  The second item of interest is that the arrangement of the story factors into how I feel about the fate of this character.  Taking the second part first, it is interesting to hear an author talk specifically about this element of the craft.  Whether in novel or in film, I often feel that showing the narrative out-of-order is a cutesy trick that makes the story more confusing without really adding more depth.  Morrison's explanation is convincing, though; in linear order the sequence of events that conspires to Pecola's downfall would have felt like a runaway train out of control, almost fatalistic.  Instead we can treat each individual malady that befalls her separately, and wonder what kind of environment she exists in that this can happen to her.

The environment brings me back to the first point, about interrogating myself for personal blame for Pecola's suffering.  I didn't know what Morrison meant, and I probably still don't completely.  But I was in a Baby Gap the other day and noticed that the posters they had on the walls were angelic white children, nearly all with blue eyes.  That's no crime of mine, but I felt guilty when I realized I hadn't even noticed.  Of course the children were white.  Of course they had blue eyes.  How else would they look?  That's the society we live in, boys and girls, and our casual, even unconscious acceptance of it is a big part of the problem.

I have a lot of sympathy for the struggle for gay rights that is going on today.  Aside from the overt prejudice gay people face, I find the denial of self tragic.  Gay folks that are "in the closet" don't feel free to be who they are openly.  I never saw the struggle for African-American rights on the same level.  Black people are black people; it's obvious, and they can't hide it, right?  Then a year ago I listened to Roots on Audiobook, and realized that white slaveowners eradicated African roots from black slaves, taught them they were worse, taught them they were ugly, barred them from practicing their religion, barred them from speaking their own language, and robbed them of their family history.  Malcolm X makes the point powerfully in the first minute-plus of this video:

Morrison makes a strong effort, here and in Beloved, of trying to reclaim an African-American sense of identity, of beauty, of purpose.  There are so many white assumptions that we make in our society; Morrison does a great job breaking these down.

Beloved

Beloved
by Toni Morrison
read: 2012
Time 100 Novels, Guardian 1000 Novels, Pulitzer Prize

If you want to understand race in America in modern times, you have to go back.

You have to go back to the period after the Civil War.  The slaves weren't immediately given equal rights after the Emancipation Proclamation.  They weren't given jobs, or money, or land, or instructions on how to live in a white-dominated world.  They weren't put in schools, or taught to read, or educated.    If ex-slaves wanted to move to areas with more opportunity and less racial prejudice, they had to do it themselves.  If they could find such a place.

There was little family structure.  Husbands were sold from wives, mothers were sold from children.  There were few grandparents to advise parents on how they had done things.  Men and women were bred together like horses.  Many children were products of slave women raped by their white masters.  Any community the ex-slaves had, they had to build themselves.

Slavery itself had destroyed the culture blacks had left behind in Africa.  They had names given to them by the white man, religion given to them by the white man, language given to them by the white man, and any attempt to continue or recreate their African traditions was stamped out.

Is it any wonder African-Americans are still disadvantaged?  The seeds were sown in the America five or six generations ago, and it is the world in which Toni Morrison's Beloved is set.  The characters have "freedom" but still depend on white people for work.  Sethe, a runaway slave, lives in terror of whites and being sent back to that world.  Sethe and Paul D are shamed by the scars from the abuses they suffered while slaves.  Sethe's daughters Denver and Beloved suffer for the sins of their mother, sins brought on by the fear, shame, and terror of slavery.

Morrison has a gift for playing with morality.  Sethe commits a horrid crime but comes off as almost saintly.  The largesse of white people is shown to be fool's gold.  When characters Beloved and Paul D appear, disrupting the home shared by just Sethe and Denver, we go through the feelings of distrust, happiness, anger, rejection, and acceptance the characters have for one another.  Morrison's style adapts, shifting from folkiness to poetry, taking us into characters' heads in stream-of-consciousness sections, in and out of the past, beyond the wall and death and back.  Beloved is a powerful work, with some devastating sections but also real optimism.  It's the best book I've read in 2012.