TONI MORRISON ON BLACK CULTURE AND POLITICS
While unarmed Black people were being killed by police and racial inequality showed no signs of improving, I thought about what I could do. As James Baldwin said long ago, Blacks and whites are members of the same family and need to know each other as Americans whose histories and destinies are intertwined. recognized the need for more insightful and informed accounts of African American culture and Black people’s lives. Many Black people want to focus on their own issues rather than having to deal with the task of instructing white people. They feel it is white people’s responsibility to educate themselves about what they don‘t know. So I began to read more African American literature and write about what I was learning. In particular, I engaged with the writings of Toni Morrison.
Not only has Morrison produced memorable fiction but she has also achieved much as scholar and teacher of Black culture. And her reputation gives her ideas even greater credibility plus a very wide audience. Although there is plenty of room for disagreement with her views, her rich portrait of African-American culture and history and her attunement to the varieties of Black American life provide great opportunities for expanding knowledge of a crucial part of the American experience. For those who feel the need to get a more balanced vision of what America is and how it has become what it is, Toni Morrison is a fine source.
Morrison celebrates Black American culture and rejects cultural assimilation; her writing is about Black people and for Black readers; and she favors a Black aesthetic. In Song of Solomon, she depicts Black communities in the rural South as places where African-American culture still exists and where traditional wisdom might be found. In contrast, her portrayal of big city life with its amoral capitalism and unbridled technological development tends to focus on the dehumanization and alienation that are often its consequence. But she is not merely romanticizing what came before and totally rejecting modern life.
Traditional Black culture, although very rich, does have its downsides. Due to dire circumstances, Black communities were not always able to give much space for individual growth. In Sula, the fascinating Sula is strongly opposed by the members of her rural town due to unconventional behavior. So Morrison’s writing about the past and tradition should be viewed in the context of her critique of modern life, since it provides an antidote to the extreme individualism, mindless consumption, and spiritual alienation of much of contemporary America.
In her novels, characters may search for inner development, emotional fullness, intact communities, and harmony with nature, all of which are vital for a healthy and full life. Since the Black communities in the rural areas preserve such values to varying degrees, they can be a place of refuge and regeneration for those taking a break from the modern world. Their myths and legends have spiritual depth and are vividly imaginative which can help rejuvenate urban residents that sojourn there. The central character, Milkman’s journey to the rural South in Song of Solomon is a prime example of such transformation.
Morrison shows how aware she is of the positive dimensions of the modern world in Jazz, which takes place in New York City during the 1920s. Black people are excited and thrilled by the freedom, dynamism, and openness of that great city. In Tar Baby, Jade, the main woman character is transported by the city’s energy and fullness in the 1970s. In her view, this great city has everything for Black people. Morrison recognizes the coldness of human relations in the bustling and hustling city but her picture of urban life is not one-sided. Nor is her picture of Black rural life completely favorable. The sleepy town in Florida where the main characters in Tar Baby spend some time provides a sense of community for its inhabitants but some of the men are misogynistic and the place lacks energy and a sense of purpose. It is not clear whether it has a viable future.
What then is Morrison advocating if not a return to the past? She would like to see a rediscovery of the positive dimensions of African American life at an earlier time. This would enable Black culture in America today to become balanced and well-integrated so that Black people could face the uncertain future with sufficient cultural resources at their back. To succeed at such an undertaking, they must let go of the outside cultural influences that have had an adverse effect on their lives. In the economic sphere, this means the type of capitalism which encourages materialism and destroys community, but Morrison is not saying that all Western influences are harmful.
What she finds harmful in the United States is extreme individualism bolstered by beliefs in the sanctity of rational self-interest and the notion that freedom is absence of restraint and implies no responsibilities to others. These ideas have had deleterious consequences within the Black community. In Jazz, the narrator comments that after 20 years of life in New York City, many of its Black residents are no longer concerned about anyone outside themselves. So she promotes a positive conception of community: individual growth in harmony with rather than in opposition to the community. Morrison recognizes that harmony and balance between the individual and the community is a universal value that can be culturally defined in many different ways, some of them harmful and excessive, others liberating and empowering. For her, each culture must find its own way to achieve this balance, and she does not recommend that other peoples adopt African-American approaches.
Like Ralph Ellison, Morrison made a strong case for the indispensable role of African Americans in the making of American culture by detailing the ways in which white American identity has been forged in opposition to stereotypes of Black people. But she is also aware of the great impact of mainstream American culture on Black culture. The culture of Black Americans and that of the dominant white culture have developed separately to a considerable degree, yet there has been much mutual exchange and influence. When she discusses the jazz age, although this is when Black people indelibly stamped American culture in their image, it is also the time when modernist writers like Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Dos Passos contributed to the establishment of the unique American posture suggested by the term “jazz.” American culture is a mixture, even though the different cultures remain somewhat distinct. And a big reason why American culture has such a unique flavor is due to the African-American influence.
Morrison’s discussion of the development of the African-American self in Beloved and Jazz highlights major transitions in Black culture. Rather than remove Black culture from history and freeze it in time, she is acutely sensitive to the ways in which its evolution and growth is a product of history. During the time of slavery, there was only a glimmer of appreciation for the worth and value of the individual among Black Americans. The severity of survival in the rural South after Reconstruction required close cooperation among members of the community, and there could be little tolerance for deviant behavior. But the urban environments of the 1920s with their freedom from the restrictions of rural life allowed individualism to blossom, an example of new cultural developments made possible by changing historical conditions.
The relation between Morrison’s cultural nationalism and political views needs to be clarified. When she began seriously writing in the late 1960s, the Black Arts Movement founded by Amiri Baraka was spreading its wings. It advocated cultural nationalism in support of Black Power and took a militant political stance similar to that of Malcolm X. From this perspective, the willingness of Dr. King and James Baldwin to hold out the olive branch to white people and to strive for integration was clearly unrevolutionary and bourgeois. This raises the question of whether she was a proponent of nonviolence or of “any means necessary”? How did she view the political issues of the late 1960s and early 1970s?
Morrison believed that her role in the struggle for racial justice was to be a writer and public intellectual, not a person who actively promoted an ideology or took to the streets in protest. Her writing was never didactic; she expected participation from the reader and highly valued the contribution of the reader to the dialogue she initiated through her writing. But she never hesitated to speak out in a resonant voice when she recognized that public discourse was being debased by a language replete with stereotypes of Black people. She edited and contributed to volumes on the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill and O. J. Simpson cases, incisively critiquing the official stories and dominant narratives. Her novels, too, were always politically engaged and governed by the creed: “The best art is political and you ought to be able to make it unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time.”
In her view, social change would occur through reconstruction of a positive racial identity based on the Black cultural heritage and an understanding of the struggles that Black Americans had undergone over the past few hundred years. This was the political task to which she devoted her life, and her political vision was oriented to the long arc of history. She did not react to racist provocations and never took on the task of instructing white people on racial matters.
Morrison deeply appreciated her parents and imbibed from them the stories and folk culture that they had grown up with in the rural South. She had total confidence in who she was and where she had come from. Her soul was expansive, and she always respected people of goodwill, even those with whom she disagreed politically. Her emphasis on the virtues of Black culture was a lot stronger than that of Dr. King, and she never imitated James Baldwin’s early attempts to educate white people, but such differences did not prevent her from looking up to them. She greatly admired their personal courage in facing up to evil, dedication to racial justice, and moral example. When Dr. King’s grandson asked her what she would ask Dr. King if she could speak to him, she replied that she hoped he was not disappointed in her.
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