Speaking the “truth by dissembling”: Necessary ambiguities in the Tar‐Baby tale

Abstract

Summary The following paper is an adapted version of the introduction to a chapter, entitled “Symbolic Orphans: the Politics of the ‘Father‐Tongue’ in [Toni Morrison's] Tar Baby”, from my current doctoral thesis. The fundamental premise underlying this chapter is that Morrison, in her text Tar Baby, uses the complex history of the Tar‐Baby tales, and the trickster‐figure of those tales, in order to trace the cultural origin of African‐American people, to outline the “charts of cultural descent” encoded in their story traditions, and to reclaim such traditions from dominant appropriations of them, for African‐American cultures. The paper that follows does not discuss Morrison's text at all, but looks, instead at the ways in which the history and lineage of the African‐American Tar‐Baby tale can be seen to reflect and parallel the history and lineage of African‐Americans themselves, and can further be understood as an important example of cultural preservation, through very particular cultural methods, in the face of a dominant American culture that sought to erase and censure African‐Americans’ identification with an African past, lineage and culture.