Revolutionary Suicide in Toni Morrison's Fiction

Abstract

[On slaveships, some Igbos] wished to die on idea that they should then get back to their own country. The captain in order to obviate this idea, thought of an expedient viz. to cut off heads of those who died intimating to them that if determined to go, they must return without heads. The slaves were accordingly brought up to witness operation. One of them by violent exertion got loose and to where nettings had been unloosed in order to empty tubs, he darted overboard. The ship brought to, man was placed in main chains to catch him which he perceiving, signs which words cannot express expressive of his in escaping. He then went down and was seen no more. (qtd. in Cowley and Mannix 108) In this recollection of 1788 slaveship, Dr. Ecroide Claxton admits inadequacy of language to convey escaping man's happiness: He made signs which words cannot express. Suicide often provokes rhetorical impasse here encountered; sign is clear but incommunicable. Claxton cannot translate joy of man who, flying to place of escape, found way out of horror and defied captain's command that Africans remain onboard. During Middle Passage, some people fought back physically; others survived in more covert ways; still others jumped overboard. On several ships, was an epidemic of suicide at last minute (Cowley and Mannix 111). [1] Although this leap to freedom, and death, haunts African American literature (Paule Marshall's Brown Girl, Brownstones, James Baldwin's Another Country, Suzan-Lori Parks's The Death of Last Black Man in Whole Entire World, Dawn Turner Trice's Only Twice I've Wished for Heaven, Shay Youngblood's Shakin' Mess Outta M isery), act of suicide often goes unnamed. And potential of Africans and African Americans as an imagistic and thematic trope has generated far more critical discussion than its metonymic twin, suicide. [2] Despite number of self-inflicted deaths in Toni Morrison's novels and fact that she wrote her master's thesis on alienation and suicide in William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf, there has been little critical attention given to repetition of self-destruction in her own work. [3] In Beloved (1988), woman jumps overboard during Middle Passage; in Jazz (1992), Violet's mother, Rose Dear, climbs into well, drowning herself in 1892; in Sula (1973), shell-shocked veteran Shadrack institutes National Suicide Day on 3 January 1920; on opening page of Song of Solomon (1977), Robert Smith leaps from top of Mercy Hospital on 18 February 1931; in The Bluest Eye (1970), Pecola Breedlove wills self-disappearance through longing to possess eyes of another face ('Please God . . . Please make me disappear' [59]). These bodies do not tell of capitulation to dominant powers but comprise one part of larger multivalent narrative of black survival in North America. The act of self -destruction overtly participates in racial and class struggles, revealing, to borrow phrase from Michel Foucault, a body totally imprinted by history (148). [4] A dual impulse toward erasure and survival, corresponding to happiness of man who leapt off ship in 1788, distinguishes Morrison's thematic. In A Taste of Power, Elaine Brown traces Black Power Movement in United States to African insurrections and to the first Africans who had leaped from slave ships in suicidal rejection of slavery (355). In Morrison's work, suicide operates on two revolutionary levels: Within story, it functions as political form of resistance--a break in history--and within narrative structure, it comprises discursive strategy, an organizational axis around which meanings revolve--a break in textual time. First, I want to discuss difficulty of talking about suicide and its ontological relevance to revolutionary struggles. …