Reversing the Middle Passage: The Afrofuturist Aesthetic of Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon

Abstract

Reversing the Middle Passage: The Afrofuturist Aesthetic of Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon Ousseynou B. Traore (bio) Before looking at Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and how it reflects Afrofuturism, it may be helpful first to define that concept itself. According to Alex Zamalin, “[Afrofuturism] has long been associated with science fiction and technology in the future, replete with robots and supercomputers” (10). While there are no robots and supercomputers in Song of Solomon, there is plenty about the past, the future, and their complex back-and-forth interactions. Ytasha L. Womack offers the following: Whether through literature, visual arts, music, or grassroots organizing, Afrofuturism redefines culture and notions of blackness for today and the future. Both an artistic aesthetic and a framework of critical theory, Afrofuturism combines elements of science fiction, historical fiction, fantasy, Afrocentricity, and magic realism with non-Western beliefs. In some cases, it’s a total re-envisioning of the past and speculation about the future rife with cultural critiques. (9, my emphasis) Womack’s definition has the advantage of being deeply rooted in debates and theories that demarcate the recognizably Afrocentric orientation and also the African and African Diaspora myths, beliefs systems, and traditions of spirituality and magic that inform the aesthetic of Song of Solomon. On the other hand, science fiction and technology, as generally understood, admittedly do not play much of a role in the novel. However, in his essay “Black to the Future,” African-American science fiction writer Walter Mosley states: that “Any book that offers an alternative account for the way things are catches my attention. . . . This is because I believe that the world we live in is so much larger, has so many more possibilities, than our simple sciences describe” (405). Mosley is critical of the limitations of what he calls “our simple sciences”—perhaps meaning Western or Eurocentric ones—and instead promotes an “alternative account,” science fiction, for the way that things in a global world are “so much larger” than the Eurocentric West. Mosley then goes on to list a few major voices in the mainstream of black speculative and science fiction, such as Octavia E. Butler, Samuel R. Delaney, Steven Barnes, and concludes: “There are also flashes of the genre in such respected writers as Toni Morrison and Derrick Bell” (406). Womack and Mosley thus confirm and complement each other’s critical thought and open the way for a variety of reflections. Building on the foundation provided by these two critics, I propose to examine what Mosley calls “flashes of [End Page 122] the genre” in Morrison’s Song of Solomon, which I would describe as exemplifying an “Afromythic” literary mode within the global theory of Afrofuturism. In Song of Solomon, Pilate is the ancestor. For Morrison, “the concept of the ancestor is not necessarily as a parent but as an abiding, interested, benevolent, guiding presence that is yours and is concerned about you” (Davis 227). Pilate embodies a huge library of West and West-Central African cultures that reflect on the past, the present, and the future; she arrives in Michigan with a green tarpaulin bag containing the skeletal remains of her murdered father and refers to it as her “inheritance” (97; 163–64). But Pilate is also the central bearer of the concept of Afrofuturism in Song of Solomon as she becomes its principal activating force that governs Mr. Smith’s flight at the beginning of the novel as well as Milkman’s soaring jump on Solomon’s Leap at the end. Her fantastic “self-birth” and lack of a navel mark her as one not born of a human being but self-created or created by forces beyond human knowledge. Nevertheless, Afrofuturism as a speculative process in this novel does not involve what is usually described as science fiction and does not depend on Western technology or science. Rather, it is activated by creative African knowledge and memory systems, especially the myth of “Flying Africans” who flew back to Africa as a form of resistance to slavery and a way of reversing the Middle Passage and its aftermath. Two philosophical expressions or models from the African experience come to mind. One...