The Source of Self-Regard

by Toni Morrison

  Before I try to illustrate some of these points by using Tar Baby as an example, let me hasten to say that there are eminent and powerful, intelligent, and gifted black writers who not only recognize Western literature as part of their own heritage but who have employed it to such an advantage that it illuminates both cultures. I neither object to nor am indifferent to their work or their views. I relish it, in precisely the way I relish a world of literature from other cultures. The question is not legitimacy or the “correctness” of a point of view, but the difference between my point of view and theirs. Nothing would be more hateful to me than a monolithic prescription for what black literature is or ought to be. I simply wanted to write literature that was irrevocably, indisputably black not because its characters were, or because I was, but because it took as its creative task and sought as its credentials those recognized and verifiable principles of black art.

  In the writing of Tar Baby, memory meant recollecting the told story. I refused to read a modern or Westernized version of the told story, selecting out instead the pieces that were disturbing or simply memorable: fear, tar, the rabbit’s outrage at a failing in traditional manners (the tar baby does not speak). Why was the tar baby formed, to what purpose, what was the farmer trying to protect, and why did he think the doll would be attractive to the rabbit—what did he know and what was his big mistake? Why does the tar baby cooperate with the farmer, and do the things the farmer wishes to protect? What makes his job more important than the rabbit’s, why does he believe that a briar patch is sufficient punishment, what does the briar patch represent to the rabbit, to the tar baby, and to the farmer?

  “Creation” meant putting the above pieces together in parts, first of all concentrating on tar as a part. What is it and where does it come from? What are its holy uses and its profane uses—consideration of which led to a guiding motif: ahistorical earth and historical earth. That theme was translated into the structure in these steps:

  Coming out of the sea (that which was there before earth) is both the beginning and the end of the book—in both of which Son emerges from the sea in a section that is not numbered as a chapter.

  The earth that came out of the sea, its conquest by modern man, and the pain caused to the conquered life forms, as they are viewed by fishermen and clouds.

  Movement from the earth into the household: its rooms, its quality of shelter. The activity for which the rooms were designed: eating, sleeping, bathing, leisure, etc.

  The house disrupted precisely as the earth was disrupted. The chaos of the earth duplicated in the house designed for order. The disruption caused by the man born out of the womb of the sea accompanied by ammonia odors of birth.

  The conflict that follows between the ahistorical (the pristine) and the historical (or social) forces inherent in the uses of tar.

  The conflict, further, between two kinds of chaos: civilized chaos and natural chaos.

  The revelation, then, is the revelation of secrets. Everybody with one or two exceptions has a secret: secrets of acts committed (as with Margaret and Son), and secrets of thoughts unspoken but driving nonetheless (as with Valerian and Jadine). And then the deepest and earliest secret of all: that just as we watch other life, other life watches us.

  Goodbye to All That

  Race, Surrogacy, and Farewell

  SOME YEARS AGO, when I was invited to be interviewed on a television show, I asked whether it was possible for our conversation to avoid any questions or topics about race. I suspected that if such voluntary exclusion were in place, then other equally interesting subjects might surface and produce a rare media encounter—one free of the cant one is inevitably forced to resort to in such a venue, on such a subject. I thought the experiment would be a first for me and elicit my views on what constitutes my writing life; or the relationship between teaching and writing, between editing and teaching, how the pleasure and despair of being a mother influenced my work—loosened or limited it; my views on the problems of transcription and oral data in slave narratives, the compelling blend of vernacular, standard, street, and lyric language for an American writer, the importance of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Jean Toomer to me; how poverty, once a romanticized, sentimentalized figuration in American literature, has returned to its nineteenth-century predecessor as a metaphor for illness, crime, and sin; of my work on the letters of abolitionists James McCune Smith and Gerrit Smith. All of these are topics, or shreds of topics, that have had something to do with my thinking, writing life. The interviewer agreed, but when we met, a few minutes before the show, he changed his mind, saying that the race aspect was far too interesting to abandon. I am not at all sure that the sort of chat I wanted would have had any appeal whatsoever to anybody else. Probably not. The interviewer’s judgment was accurate if predictable: racial difference is a very big seller. The point I am making, however, is that neither he nor his audience was interested in any aspects of me other than my raced ones. Disappointed and irked, I dragged out my kit of the media’s version of racial dialogue: great-great-granddaughter of Africans, great-great-granddaughter of slaves; great-granddaughter of sharecroppers; granddaughter of migrants; beneficiary of the American Dream—I ended up sleepwalking through a wan, rambling, profoundly uninteresting dialogue.

  I had such a yearning for an environment in which I could speak and write without every sentence being understood as mere protest or understood as mere advocacy. Now, in no way should this desire be misinterpreted as an endorsement of deracination, or the fashionable term, “race transcendence,” nor as an example of the dwindling impact of racial politics. Even a glance at the U.S. 2000 census data, where more refined racial identifications are also more pronounced; even a light curiosity about recommendations for death-penalty moratoriums; a vague awareness of the bruising disenfranchisement of African Americans in the last presidential election; the record numbers of discrimination and racial profiling cases—none of these vectors of racial policy would lead one to the conclusion that racial politics is benign. I don’t foresee, or want, a color-blind, race-neutral environment. The nineteenth century was the time for that. It’s too late, now. Our race-inflected culture not only exists, it thrives. The question is whether it thrives as a virus or a bountiful harvest of possibilities.

  From the beginning, I claimed a territory by insisting on being identified as a black woman writer exclusively interested in facets of African American culture. I made these unambiguous assertions to impose on all readers the visibility in and the necessity of African American culture to my work precisely in order to encourage a wider critical vocabulary than the one in which I was educated. I wanted this vocabulary to stretch to the margins for the wealth that lay there and thus, not abandon, but reconfigure what occupied the center. It seemed to me a way of enriching the dialogue between and among cultures. I wanted to make impossible the role of temporary or honorary white writer; to frustrate the label of the inconsequentially black writer. The “just happen to be black” writer. My project was to discover what the black topic did and could do to language practices. I sought language that could exist on at least two levels: the clearly raced identity right alongside the unraced one that had to function within an already coded racial discourse. But I was never very good at manifestos, so my attempts proved to be a tightrope, a balancing that confused some readers, delighted others, disappointed some, but provoked enough of them to let me know the work was not always in vain. It led me to try strategies, employ structures and techniques emanating from African American culture cheek by jowl with, and responsive to, other ones.

  This effort to balance the demands of cultural specificity with those of artistic range is a condition, rather than a problem, for me. A challenge rather than a worry. A refuge rather than a refugee camp. Home territory, not foreign land. Inhabiting and manipulating that sphere has excited me like no other. Of course African American writers have cont
emplated, written about, struggled with, and have taken positions on this politics or art, race and/or aesthetics debate since Phillis Wheatley suggested that slavery did her a favor. Jean Toomer tried to escape its shackle altogether by inventing an American race. Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, African American scholars, and a host of post–civil rights writers have weighed in on the subject. And it is or has been, since the nineteenth century, a keenly argued concern of every immigrant group of writers in the United States. From Henry James to Chang-rae Lee; from William Faulkner to Maxine Hong Kingston; from Isaac Bashevis Singer to Frank McCourt; from Herman Melville to Paula Marshall. Still it is hard for me to believe that the necessity of responding to a perceived “outsider” status has been demanded so loudly and so insistently of any group more than African American artists. To me the implied, even voiced question, “Are you a black writer or an American writer?” not only means “Are you subverting art to politics?” It also means “Are you a black writer or a universal writer?” suggesting that the two are clearly incompatible. Race awareness apparently can never be sundered from politics. It is the result of a shotgun wedding originally enforced by whites, while African American artists (in the public and academic domains) are faulted and flailed for dealing with the consequences of this marriage. Forced to shout endlessly to white criticism, “These are not my racial politics—they are yours.” These battles against such a mind-set are exhausting and are especially debilitating since those who launched the fray have only to observe it, not participate in it. Have only to misunderstand the demands of cultural specificity as identity politics or assaults on the canon, or special pleading, or some other threatening gesture. And the people most invested in the argument are usually those who have already reaped its benefits.

  I suppose I approached the politics versus art, race versus aesthetics debate initially the way an alchemist would: looking for that combination of ingredients that turns dross into gold. But there is no such formula. So my project became to make the historically raced world inextricable from the artistic view that beholds it, and in so doing encourage readings that dissect both. Which is to say I claimed the right and the range of authorship. To interrupt journalistic history with a metaphorical one; to impose on a rhetorical history an imagistic one; to read the world, misread it; write and unwrite it. To enact silence and free speech. In short to do what all writers aspire to do. I wanted my work to be the work of disabling the art versus politics argument; to perform the union of aesthetics and ethics.

  I am impressed by the fruitfulness and importance of scholarly and literary challenges that search for more ways in which to both sign and defang race, acknowledge its import and limit its corrosive effect on language. That is, work that avoids the unnatural schism between the political realm in which race matters and the artistic one in which it is presumed not to.

  Scholarship that abandons the enforcing properties of the false debate and welcomes the challenges in the liberating ones hidden at its center is becoming sensitive to the fact that things have changed. Language that requires the mutual exclusion of x and y, or the dominance of x over y, is slowly losing its magic, its force. But it is literature that rehearses and enacts this change in ways far in advance of and more probingly than the critical language that follows it. Perhaps it is because of my own farewell to all that art versus politics, culture against aesthetics quarrel that I find literary partings (moments of racial goodbyes) so promising a site in which to examine the sea change expressive language of racial encounter has undergone, a sea change yielding opportunities for richer and more nuanced explorations. Over time the rites of farewell between the races as represented in some selected examples in American literature have moved dramatically from blatant assumptions of racial hierarchy to less overt ones to coded representation to nuanced decodings of those assumptions; from control to dismissal to anxiety to a kind of informed ease. Now, I insist on not being misunderstood here—implying that neutralizing race is the work of literature, its job, so to speak. It is not. Nevertheless the shape of racial discourse can be located there. A shape that plays about and moves through literature and therefore in our imaginations when we read it. Although even this brief inquiry could and ought to be widened, I will limit my observations to women writers because intimacy and alienation and severance between women is more often free of the sexual competition implicit among male writers addressing the same subject, and anxieties about sexual dominance can blur as well as exacerbate the racial equation (as Shakespeare and Hollywood both knew). Saying goodbye is a moment ready-made for literary histrionics, for deep emotional revelations seething with meaning. I am interested in the farewell between black and white strangers who have, or might have, shared something significant; or who represent the end of something larger than themselves, where the separation symbolizes loss or renewal, for example. There are the partings between black and white women whose histories are permanently entangled. Many, if not most, of these are surrogate relationships: surrogate mothers in the nanny-child domain; surrogate mothers, aunts, and other relatives in the servant-mistress category; surrogate sisters in which the friendships become surrogate, illegal, precisely because the dynamics of power between employer and employee are inescapably raced; and sometimes, though rarely, there is the farewell between black and white adult women in which the equity is not race based. Alice Walker’s Meridian is an early example.

  Let me begin with a farewell scene in a fine and prolific writer who is not American, but who was herself a foreigner far from home and who was in a position to form opinions on racial relationships from close quarters, Isak Dinesen. There is a haunting scene in Out of Africa that exhibits standard racial discourse as well as the presumptions of the foreigner’s home. The scene in which the author is leaving a place, Kenya, that has been her home for much of her adult life. The necessity of moving out of Africa and its melancholy surface in each moment of leave-taking.

  A passage toward the end reads as follows:

  Now the old women were sorry that I was leaving them. From this last time, I keep the picture of a Kikuyu woman, nameless to me, for I did not know her well, she belonged, I think, to Kathegu’s village, and was the wife or widow of one of his many sons. She came towards me on a path on the plain, carrying on her back a load of the long thin poles which the Kikuyu use for constructing the roofs of their huts,—with them this is women’s work. These poles may be fifteen feet long; when the women carry them they tie them together at the ends, and the tall conical burdens give to the people underneath them, as you see them traveling over the land, the silhouette of a prehistoric animal, or a Giraffe. The sticks which this woman was carrying were all black and charred, sooted by the smoke of the hut during many years; that meant that she had been pulling down her house and was trailing her building materials, such as they were, to new grounds. When we met she stood dead still, barring the path to me, staring at me in the exact manner of a Giraffe in a herd, that you will meet on the open plain, and which lives and feels and thinks in a manner unknowable to us. After a moment she broke out weeping, tears streaming over her face, like a cow that makes water on the plain before you. Not a word did she or I myself speak, and, after a few minutes, she ceded the way to me, and we parted, and walked on in opposite directions. I thought that after all she had some materials with which to begin her new house, and I imagined how she would set to work, and tie her sticks together, and make herself a roof.

  Lots of other Kenyans wept and deplored Dinesen’s exit: because of their affection for her, or perhaps the loss of paid employment and protection, the despair of having to find other shelter. But the above recollection bedevils me for other reasons. What does the phrase “barring the path to me” mean? Not barring the path, or barring me in the path, but barring the path to me. Is the path only to and for Dinesen? Is the woman out of place? The syntax is curious. Additionally there is the sustained specu
lation about the woman’s errand—carrying wood to build, rebuild, or repair her roof. To make a home for herself in a land that is her home, but in which she (the Kikuyu woman) is made to feel the outsider. While the true foreigner, the author, is leaving a false home about which she has some misgivings. The description of Dinesen’s African woman is instructive. The sticks on her head make Dinesen think of a “prehistoric animal.” Furthermore, the quiet woman is staring at her with what emotions we cannot yet know because she is relegated to the animal kingdom, where emotions and thoughts and life itself cannot be known by us. The woman is like a giraffe in a herd, speechless, unknowable, and when she evinces some powerful emotion such as sorrow, or rage, or disgust, or loneliness, or even joy we cannot know it because her tears are like a cow voiding its urine in public. It is a picture, says Dinesen, that she keeps with her, this nameless unknown woman. Surely a surrogate, a symbol, of Kenya and what she thinks of the world she is leaving behind. In these passages, beautiful “aesthetic” language serves to undermine the terms: the native, the foreigner, home, homelessness in a wash of preemptive images that legitimate and obscure their racist assumptions while providing protective cover from a possibly more damaging insight.

  If we leave 1930s Africa and move to 1940s America to another writer with claim to some intimate relations to blacks, there is further instruction.

  In a classic tale of American womanhood, Gone with the Wind, the black woman/white woman connection is the one we have learned from Harriet Beecher Stowe and others: a ubiquitous mammy whose devotion and nursing skills are as fierce as they are loyal. These surrogate mothers are more serviceable than real mothers not only because of their constancy, but also because, unlike biological mothers, you can command them and dismiss them without serious penalty. Notwithstanding their presence in the text, there will always come a time when these surrogates leave—they either exit the narrative itself because they are no longer relevant to it, or they leave the life of their mistress because their value as teachers is reduced when the cared-for matures, or when circumstances have changed: moving away, insubordination, or death. Of interest to me is how this severance is played out. Is protective language summoned to make the black woman’s disappearance palatable? Is there a dependence on a metaphoric equation with the unfeeling, unthinking animal world? Are there deep or awkward silences to accompany her dismissal? Are there tears or a stubborn insistence upon permanent attachment?