Toni Morrison, "Black Matters" (Summary)

 

Toni Morrison advocates for the extension of American literature study to a wider landscape, drawing a critical geography that allows for discovery, intellectual adventure, and close exploration. They believe that as an African-American woman writer, she must think about how free she can be in her genderized, sexualized, wholly racialized world. To think about the full implications of her situation, she considers what happens when other writers work in a highly and historically racialized society.

Morison questions the conventional wisdom that traditional American literature is free of, informed, and unshaped by the presence of Africans and African-Americans in the United States. She believes that the contemplation of this black presence is central to any understanding of our national literature and should not be allowed to hover at the margins of the literary imagination.

Morrison queries whether the major characteristics of American literature, such as individualism, masculinity, social engagement, moral problematics, and thematics of innocence, are actually responses to a dark Africanist presence. The formation of the nation necessitated coded language and purposeful restriction to deal with the racial disingenuousness and moral frailty at its heart. The literature reproduced the necessity for codes and restriction through significant omissions, contradictions, and heavily nuanced conflicts.

Morrison’s curiosity about the ways in which a nonwhite, Africanlike (or Africanist) presence or persona was constructed in the United States has become an informal study of what is called American Africanism. This term refers to the denotative and connotative blackness that African peoples have come to signify, as well as the entire range of views, assumptions, readings, and misreadings that accompany Eurocentric learning about these people.

The focus of African-American studies should not be on a shift in hierarchy but rather on understanding what makes intellectual domination possible and how knowledge is transformed from invasion and conquest to revelation and choice. Examining the nature and cause of literary "whiteness" through a close look at literary "blackness" could provide access to a deeper reading of American literature, potentially revealing the role of whiteness in the construction of what is loosely described as "American."

The literature on the presence and influence of Africanist peoples in American criticism has been largely overlooked due to the tendency to define racialism in terms of its consequences on the victim rather than its impact on the object of racist policy and attitudes. It is crucial to examine the impact of racism on those who perpetuate it, including examining the impact of notions of racial hierarchy, racial exclusion, and racial vulnerability and availability on nonblacks who held, explored, or altered those notions.

Historians, social scientists, anthropologists, psychiatrists, and some students of comparative literature have approached these areas, but urgently needed attention should be paid to the literature of the western country with one of the most resilient Africanist populations in the world. A criticism that insists that literature is not only "universal" but also "race-free" risks lobotomizing that literature and diminishing both the art and the artist. As an African-American and writer, I stand to benefit from this line of questioning, as there is no escape from racially inflected language in a wholly racialized society.

Some powerful literary critics in the United States have never read any African-American text, which seems to have done them no harm and presented them with no discernible limitations in the scope of their work or influence. There is a centuries-long, hysterical blindness to feminist discourse and the way in which women and women's issues were read or unread. National literatures and writers often describe and inscribe what is really on the national mind, with the architecture of a new white man as its focus. However, the authors themselves are among the most sensitive, intellectually anarchic, representative, and probing artists.
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Morrison’s early assumptions as a reader were that black people signified little or nothing in the imagination of white American writers. However, the author stopped reading as a reader and began to read as a writer, realizing that the subject of the dream is the dreamer, and the fabrication of an Africanist persona is reflexive, an extraordinary meditation on the self, and a powerful exploration of the fears and desires that reside in the writerly conscious.

National literatures and writers play a crucial role in shaping the nation's consciousness and understanding of the African American experience. By examining the ways in which Africanist personae, narratives, and idioms are used and represented, we can better understand the complex relationship between fiction and reality.

The novel "Sapphira and the Slave Girl" is a classic fugitive slave narrative that emphasizes Nancy's fugitive state within the household before her escape. The real fugitive, the text asserts, is the slave mistress. The plot escapes the author's control and points to the hopelessness of excising racial considerations from formulations of white identity.

Nancy's existence on the Colbert farm is central to the story, as she is forced to hide her emotions, thoughts, and body from pursuers. Unable to please Sapphira, she is also barred from help, instruction, or consolation from her own mother, Till. Cather acknowledges and banishes this wholly unanalyzed mother-daughter relationship by inserting a furtive exchange between Till and Rachel

The dialogue surrounding the story revolves around the silence of four hundred years, reflecting historical discourse on slave parent-child relationships and pain. The protagonist, Sapphira, is committed to escape from the possibility of developing her adult personality and sensibilities, as well as her femaleness, motherhood, community of women, and body. She resides on Nancy, a young, healthy, and sexually appetizing Africanist girl, who has transferred its care into the hands of others. This allows her to escape illness, decay, confinement, anonymity, and physical powerlessness.

The novel serves as a fugitive, designed to meditate on the moral equivalence of free white women and enslaved black women. The author's imaginative strategy is difficult and impossible, but she allows the novel to escape from fiction into nonfiction. For narrative credibility, Cather substitutes her own determination to force the equation outside the narrative.

At the end of the novel, it turns into a kind of memoir, as the author's recollection of herself as a child witnessing the return, reconciliation, and imposed "all rightness" in untenable, outrageous circumstances is muzzled in the epilogue. The shape and detail of their lives are hers, not theirs. Cather feels obliged to give the Africanist mother and daughter center stage, even though they make claims and impose demands of imaginative accountability over and above the author's will to contain them.

In returning to her childhood, Cather returns to a very personal and private experience, working out and toward the meaning of female betrayal as she faces the void of racism. She may not have arrived safely, like Nancy, but to her credit, she did undertake the dangerous journey.