Interrogating Memory, Heritage, and Identity: Milkman’s Search for Home in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon

Abstract

This essay deals with the issue of how to locate black identity and cultural memory in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. Morrison’s novel centers around Milkman’s journey from his Northern middle class home to his ancestral home in the South. For that reason, critics have vastly read Song of Solomon as a novel celebrating Milkman’s recovery of authentic black identity and his achievement of “spiritual wholeness” in the culture bearing deep Southern black community. However, I contend that Song of Solomon is not a novel that celebrates black cultural heritage and baptizes its protagonist with authentic blackness. Morrison’s novel does not embrace a nativist view of black identity; rather, it interrogates and disrupts the essentialist concept of authentic black culture and identity. Milkman is a man who feel psychologically alienated and fragmented in the North even though his middle class father preaches him that black people can achieve freedom only through material success. Guided by two spiritual black women Pilate and Circe, Milkman moves toward his ancestral home in the South but the novel does not end up with his total communion to his authentic African-ness. Rather, closely following the trajectory of Milkman’s journey through his ancestral town, Song of Solomon dismantles the myth of authentic memory and identity. At the end of the novel, Milkman comes to a spiritual awakening that he has romanticized the past and now should stop searching for his identity in the far misty and mythical space. The ultimate lesson that Milkman learns through his journey is that he should be able to fly without ever leaving his reality just like Pilate and Circe. Thus, at the end of the novel, Milkman is transformed as a man who understands that he should be able to construct postcolonial home right in the middle of oppressive reality in order to be a truly liberated and whole person. (Kongju National University)