Representation, Race, and the "Language" of the Ineffable in Toni Morrison's Narrative

Abstract

bell hooks has made insightful remark that of race and representation have become contemporary obsession, yet little progress is made if we transform images without shifting paradigms, changing perspectives, ways of looking (4-7). This essay argues that Toni Morrison brings together art of story-telling and questions of race in decisively political and ethical relationship centered in language of felicity and liberation. Morrison's use of suppressed popular communicative forms - visual, oral, musical, and more - is, as Trudier Harris has pointed out, an integral part of her uncovering discredited knowledge.(1) While this reactivation of local memories is certainly among Morrison's cultural objectives, is grounding of her outlook in race-specific yet race-free prose that molds literary form to exigencies of racial difference: My vulnerability, she says, would lie in romanticizing blackness rather than demonizing it; vilifying whiteness rather than reifying it (Playing x-xi). In Morrison's narrative project, these cautious remarks take shape in two principal ways: She both dis-articulates African American experience from its place in system of negative associations in cultural imaginary of what she terms American Africanist discourse, and she re-articulates concept of black American experience around diversity, not homogeneity, of its historical forms. In what follows I will elaborate on these points, first, in context of new cultural politics of difference, drawing on Morrison's criticism itself with regard to her own positionality as black writer, and, second, in act of her narrative writing, which participates not only in an historical struggle among subaltern communities but also in forging new non-hegemonic realm of being and meaning. Morrison, I will argue, negotiates complex matrix of reality in which articulation of antagonistic or contradictory elements becomes possibility of opening up new space of cultural practice. To give past reading, to represent black American experience not simply as has been measured by dominant norms but as has emerged in terms of multi-leveled and differential struggle over meaning and subjectivity since slavery, involves re-invention of tradition and of dominant language tropes. Positioning herself in tradition of African American writing, Morrison states that for her - a writer who is black and woman - writing fiction is very different in that, more than authors of slave narratives did in past, she is interested in to rip that veil drawn over 'proceedings too terrible to relate.' The exercise is also critical for any person who is black, or who belongs to any marginalized category, for, historically, we were seldom invited to participate in discourse even when we were its topic (Sites 110). First, where tradition of slave narratives is concerned, Morrison is attentive to silences and gaps in these narratives. She is concerned with things unsaid or unsayable in those narratives of struggle, with how particular sexual economy and masculinity underpinned writings of black authors, and with these writers' inability to mine recesses of memories deemed shameful. We may note in passing scene in The Bluest Eye in which Pecola is raped by her father, though this scene is related to an earlier one in which latter was exposed to ridicule by two white men who happened to run into him while he was having his first sexual experience as boy. Morrison is, in other words, offering new kind of cultural positioning that is more attentive to black women and their role in larger racial struggle, Cornel West is right to point out that recent decisive move toward new cultural politics of difference has been made more powerful by the black diasporan womanist critique, which has led to end of the innocent notion of black essential subject (Keeping Faith 19). …