The Source of Self-Regard

by Toni Morrison

  “Now and again the thought strikes me that perhaps I have never really seen other people’s expectations, that I have only ever seen my own, and the loneliest thought in the world is the thought that what we have glimpsed is nothing other than ourselves. But now it is too late to think like that and something must be done, and before we can do anything we will have to form a picture of the twentieth century.”

  Forming a picture of the twentieth century then—not the twenty-first—is, in this novel, the future’s project.

  William Gass, in a masterful work, The Tunnel, sustains a brilliant meditation on the recent past forever marked by Nazi Germany. In it his narrator/protagonist, having completed a “safe” morally ambivalent history of German fascism, a work titled Guilt and Innocence in Hitler’s Germany, finds himself unable to write the book’s preface. The paralysis is so long and so inflexible, he turns to the exploration of his own past life and its complicitous relationship to the historical subject of his scholarship—“a fascism of the heart.” Gass ends the novel in heartbreaking images of loss. “Suppose,” he writes,

  that instead of bringing forth flowers the bulb retreated to some former time just before it burgeoned, that pollen blew back into the breeze which bore it toward its pistil; suppose the tables were turned on death, it was bullied to begin things, and bear its children backward, so that the first breath didn’t swell the lung but stepped on it instead, as with a heavy foot upon a pedal; that there was…a rebellion in the ranks, and life picked the past to be in rather than another round of empty clicks called present time….I made…a try. I abandoned Poetry for History in my Youth.

  What a journey, though, to crawl in earth first, then in filth swim; to pass through your own plumbing, meet the worms within. And realize it. That you were. Under all the world. When I was a kid I lied like a sewer system. I told my sometime chums I went there. To the realm of shades. And said I saw vast halls, the many chambers of endless caves, magic pools guarded by Merlins dressed in mole fur and cobweb, chests overflowing with doubtless dime-store-jewelry, rooms of doubloons, and, suddenly, through an opening jagged as a rip in rotten cloth, a new sun shining, meadows filled with healthy flowers, crayon-colored streams, oh, the acres of Edens inside ourselves….

  Meanwhile carry on without complaining. No arm with armband raised on high. No more booming bands, no searchlit skies. Or shall I, like the rivers, rise? Ah. Well. Is rising wise? Revolver like the Führer near an ear. Or lay my mind down by sorrow’s side.

  This is no predictable apocalyptic reflex, surfacing out of the century’s mist like a Loch Ness hallucination. This is a mourning, a requiem, a folding away of time’s own future.

  What becomes most compelling, therefore, are the places and voices where the journey into the cellar of time is a rescue of sorts, an excavation for the purposes of building, discovering, envisioning a future. I am not, of course, encouraging and anointing happy endings—forced or truly felt—or anointing bleak ones intended as correctives or warnings. I mean to call attention to whether the hand that holds the book’s metaphors is an open palm or a fist.

  In The Salt Eaters, Toni Cade Bambara opens this brilliant novel with a startling question: “Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?” Are you sure you want to be well? What flows from that very serious inquiry is a healing that requires a frightened modern-day Demeter to fathom and sound every minute of her and her community’s depths, to rethink and relive the past—simply to answer that question. The success of her excavation is described in these terms:

  “What had driven Velma into the oven…was nothing compared to what awaited her, was to come….Of course she would fight it, Velma was a fighter. Of course she would reject what could not be explained in terms of words, notes, numbers or those other systems whose roots had been driven far underground….Velma’s next trial might lead to an act far more devastating than striking out at the body or swallowing gas….

  “The patient turning smoothly on the stool, head thrown back about to shout, to laugh, to sing. No need of Minnie’s hands now. That is clear. Velma’s glow aglow and two yards wide of clear and unstreaked white and yellow. Her eyes scanning the air surrounding Minnie, then examining her own hands, fingers stretched and radiant. No need of Minnie’s hands now so the healer withdraws them, drops them in her lap just as Velma, rising on steady legs, throws off the shawl that drops down on the stool a burst cocoon.”

  The title of Salman Rushdie’s latest novel, The Moor’s Last Sigh, suggests the narrative will end on a deathbed or in a graveyard. In fact it does. The storyteller/protagonist, Moraes Zogoiby, leads us on an exhilarating journey in order to nail his papers on the wall. Papers that are the result of his “daily, silent singing for [his daily] life.” Telling, writing, recording four generations of family and national history. A history of devastating loves, transcendent hatreds; of ambition without limit and sloth without redemption; loyalties beyond understanding and deceptions beyond imagination. When every step, every pause of this imaginary is finally surrendered to our view, this is the close:

  The rough grass in the graveyard has grown high and spiky and as I sit upon this tombstone I seem to be resting upon the grass’s yellow points, weightless, floating free of burdens, borne aloft by a thick brush of miraculously unbending blades. I do not have long. My breaths are numbered, like the years of the ancient world, in reverse, and the countdown to zero is well advanced. I have used the last of my strength to make this pilgrimage….

  At the head of this tombstone are three eroded letters; my fingertip reads them for me. R I P. Very well: I will rest, and hope for peace. The world is full of sleepers waiting for their moment of return….Somewhere, in a tangle of thorns, a beauty in a glass coffin awaits a prince’s kiss. See: here is my flask. I’ll drink some wine; and then, like a latter-day Van Winkle, I’ll lay me down upon this graven stone, lay my head beneath these letters R I P, and close my eyes, according to our family’s old practice of falling asleep in times of trouble, and hope to awaken, renewed and joyful, into a better time.

  The rest, the peace is twice enunciated, but so is the hope. For renewal, joy, and, most importantly, “a better time.”

  In 1991 Ben Okri ended his novel The Famished Road with a dream so deeply felt it is prioritized over the entire narrative:

  The air in the room was calm. There were no turbulences. His [father’s] presence protected our nightspace. There were no forms invading our air, pressing down on our roof, walking through the objects. The air was clear and wide. In my sleep I found open spaces where I floated without fear….The sweetness dissolved my fears. I was not afraid of Time.

  And then it was another morning….

  A dream can be the highest point of a life.

  In 1993, continuing the story of this sighted child, Okri concludes Songs of Enchantment with a more pronounced gesture toward the future: “Maybe one day we will see the mountains ahead of us….Maybe one day we will see the seven mountains of our mysterious destiny. Maybe one day we will see that beyond our chaos there could always be a new sunlight, and serenity.”

  The symbolisms of the mountains he is referring to make up the opening of the book:

  We didn’t see the seven mountains ahead of us. We didn’t see how they are always ahead. Always calling us, always reminding us that there are more things to be done, dreams to be realized, joys to be rediscovered, promises made before birth to be fulfilled, beauty to be incarnated, and love embodied.

  We didn’t notice how they hinted that nothing is ever finished, that struggles are never truly concluded, that sometimes we have to redream our lives, and that life can always be used to create more light.

  The expectation in these lines is palpable, insistent on the possibility of “one great action lived out all the way to the sea, chang[ing] the history of the world.”

  Leslie Marmon Silko in Almanac of the De
ad flails and slashes through thousands of years of New World history, from centuries before the conquistadors made their appearances on these shores to the current day. The novel rests on a timelessness that is not only past, but a future timelessness as well—time truly without end. The final image of this narrative is the snake spirit “pointing toward the South in the direction from which the people will come.” The future tense of the verb is attached to a direction that is, unlike the directions of most of the comings we approve of, the south. And it is impossible to ignore the fact that it is precisely “the south” where walls, fences, armed guards, and foaming hysteria are, at this very moment, gathering.

  Cocoons from which healed women burst, dreams that take the terror from time, tombstone hopes for a better time, a time beyond chaos where the seven mountains of destiny lie, snake gods anticipating the people who will come from the south—these closing images following treks into the past lead one to hazard the conclusion that some writers disagree with prevailing notions of futurelessness. That they very much indeed not only have but insist on a future. That for them, for us, history is beginning again.

  I am not ferreting out signs of tentative hope, obstinate optimism in contemporary fiction; I believe I am detecting an informed vision based on harrowing experience that nevertheless gestures toward a redemptive future. And I notice the milieu from which this vision rises. It is race inflected, gendered, colonialized, displaced, hunted.

  There is an interesting trace here of divergent imaginaries, between the sadness of no more time, of the poignancy of inverted time—time that has only a past—of time itself living on “borrowed time,” between that imaginary and the other one that has growing expectations of time with a relentless future. One looks to history for the feel of time or its purgative effects; one looks through art for its signs of renewal.

  Literature, sensitive as a tuning fork, is an unblinking witness to the light and shade of the world we live in.

  Beyond the world of literature, however, is another world; the world of commentary that has a quite other view of things. A Janus head that has masked its forward face and is at pains to assure us that the future is hardly worth the time. Perhaps it is the reality of a future as durable and far-reaching as the past, a future that will be shaped by those who have been pressed to the margins, by those who have been dismissed as irrelevant surplus, by those who have been cloaked with the demon’s cape; perhaps it is the contemplation of that future that has occasioned the tremble of latter-day prophets afraid that the current disequilibria is a stirring, not an erasure. That not only is history not dead, but that it is about to take its first unfettered breath. Not soon, perhaps not in thirty years or fifty, because such a breath, such a massive intake, will take time. But it will be there. If that is so, then we should heed the meditations of literature. William Gass is correct. There are “acres of Edens inside ourselves.” Time does have a future. Longer than its past and infinitely more hospitable—to the human race.

  INTERLUDE

  Black Matter(s)

  Tribute to Martin Luther King Jr.

  Pursuing the recollections of several people for projects he is engaged in, Martin Luther King III recently asked me for my thoughts on his father. And one of his questions was predictable, designed to elicit some subjective response. He said, “If you were having a conversation with my father, what would you like to ask him?” And for some wholly unaccountable reason, my heart skipped and I fairly keened into the telephone. “Oh, I hope he is not disappointed. Do you think he’s disappointed? There must be something here to please him.” Well, I calmed my voice to disguise what was becoming obvious to me, that what I really meant was, “I hope he is not disappointed in me.”

  I went on to frame a question that I would like to put to him, and I set aside my thoughts about the current state of affairs for the dispossessed: some wins, but some big-time losses; some vaulting leaps, but much slow sinking into muddy despair.

  But all the while, I was wondering, Would he be disappointed in me? And it was odd, because I never met Reverend King. My memory of him is print-bound, electronic, through the narratives of other people. Yet I felt this personal responsibility to him. He did that to people. I realized later that I was responding to something other, and more durable, than the complex personhood of King. Not to the preacher he was or the scholar he was or the vulnerable human being, not to the political strategist, the orator, the brilliant, risk-taking activist. But I was responding to his mission. His, as he coined it, audacious faith. His expectation of transforming, appending, cosmic elegy into a psalm of brotherhood.

  His confidence that we were finer than we thought, that there were moral grounds we would not abandon, lines of civil behavior we simply would not cross. That there were things we would gladly give up for the public good, that a comfortable life, resting on the shoulders of other people’s misery, was an abomination this country, especially, among all nations, found offensive.

  I know the world is better, finer, because he lived in it. My anxiety was personal. Was I any better? Finer? Because I have lived in a world that is imaginary. Would he be disappointed in me? The answer isn’t important. But the question really is, and that is the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. He made the act of assuming personal responsibility for alleviating social harm ordinary, habitual, and irresistible. My tribute to him is the profound gratitude I feel for the gift that his life truly was.

  Race Matters

  EARLY ON in my life as a writer, I looked for but never actually found a sovereignty, an authority like that available to me in fiction writing, but at no other site. In that activity alone did I feel completely coherent and totally unfettered. There, in the process of writing, was the illusion, the deception of control, of nestling up ever closer to meaning. There was (and still is) the delight of redemption, the seduction of origineity. But I have known for a good portion of the past twenty-nine years that those delights, those seductions are rather more than less deliberate inventions necessary both to do the work and to legislate its mystery. But it became increasingly clear how language was both liberating and imprisoning. Whatever the forays of my imagination, the keeper, whose keys tinkled always in earshot, was race.

  I have never lived, nor have any of you, in a world in which race did not matter. Such a world, a world free of racial hierarchy, is frequently imagined or described as dreamscape, Edenesque, utopian so remote are the possibilities of its achievement. From Martin Luther King Jr.’s hopeful language, to Doris Lessing’s four-gated city, from Saint Augustine to Jean Toomer’s “American,” the race-free world has been posited as ideal, millennial, a condition possible only if accompanied by the Messiah or situated in a protected preserve, rather like a wilderness park.

  But, for the purposes of this talk and because of certain projects I am engaged in, I prefer to think of a world in which race does not matter—not as a theme park, or a failed and always failing dream, nor as the father’s house of many rooms. I am thinking of it as home. For three reasons.

  First, making a radical distinction between the metaphor of house and the metaphor of home helps me clarify my thinking on racial construction. Second, it moves the concept of unmattering race away from yearning and desire; away from an impossible future or an irretrievable and probably nonexistent past to a manageable, doable human activity. Third because eliminating the potency of racial constructs in language is the work I can do. I can’t wait for the ultimate liberation theory to imagine its practice and do its work. Also matters of race and matters of home are priorities in my work and both have in one way or another initiated my search for sovereignty as well as my abandonment of that search once I recognized its disguise.

  As an already and always raced writer, I knew at once, from the very beginning, that I could not, would not reproduce the master’s voice and its assumptions of the all-knowing law of the white father. Nor would I substitute his voice with that of his fawning
mistress or his worthy opponent, for both of those positions (mistress or opponent) seemed to confine me to his terrain, in his arena, accepting the house rules in the dominance game. If I have to live in a racial house, it was important at the least to rebuild it so that it was not a windowless prison into which I was forced, a thick-walled, impenetrable container from which no sound could be heard, but rather an open house, grounded, yet generous in its supply of windows and doors. Or at the most, it became imperative for me to transform this house completely. I was tempted to convert it into a palace where racism didn’t hurt so much; to crouch in one of its many rooms where coexistence offered the delusion of agency. At some point I tried to use the race house as a scaffolding from which to launch a movable feast that could operate, be celebrated on any number of chosen sites. That was the authority, the glossy comfort, the redemptive quality, the freedom writing at first seemed to promise. Yet in that freedom, as in all freedoms (especially stolen ones), lay danger. Could I redecorate, redesign, even reconceive the racial house without forfeiting a home of my own? Would this forged, willed freedom demand an equally forged homelessness? Would it condemn me to eternal bouts of nostalgia for the home I have never had and would never know? Or would it require intolerable circumspection, a self-censoring bond to the original locus of racial architecture? In short, wasn’t I (wouldn’t I always be) tethered to a death-dealing ideology even (and especially) when I honed all my intelligence toward subverting it?

  These questions, which have engaged so many, have troubled all of my work. How to be both free and situated; how to convert a racist house into a race-specific yet nonracist home? How to enunciate race while depriving it of its lethal cling? They are questions of concept, of language, of trajectory, of habitation, of occupation, and, although my engagement with them has been fierce, fitful, and constantly (I think) evolving, they remain in my thoughts as aesthetically and politically unresolved. Frankly, I look to readers for literary and extraliterary analyses for much of what can be better understood. I believe, however, that my literary excursions, and my use of a house/home antagonism, are related to the matters under discussion during the course of the next two days, because so much of what seems to lie about in discourses about race concerns legitimacy, authenticity, community, belonging—is, in fact, about home. An intellectual home; a spiritual home; family and community as home; forced and displaced labor in the destruction of home; the dislocation of and alienation within the ancestral home; the creative responses to exile, the devastations, pleasures, and imperatives of homelessness as it is manifested in discussions on globalism, diaspora, migrations, hybridity, contingency, interventions, assimilations, exclusions. The estranged body, the legislated body, the body as home. In virtually all of these formations, whatever the terrain, race magnifies the matter that matters.