Because so much in public and scholarly life forbids us to take seriously the milieu of buried stimuli, it is often extremely hard to seek out both the stimulus and its galaxy and to recognize their value when they arrive. Memory is for me always fresh, in spite of the fact that the object being remembered is done and past.
Memory (the deliberate act of remembering) is a form of willed creation. It is not an effort to find out the way it really was—that is research. The point is to dwell on the way it appeared and why it appeared in that particular way.
I once knew a woman named Hannah Peace. I say “knew,” but nothing could be less accurate. I was perhaps four years old when she was in the town where I lived. I don’t know where (or even if) she is now, or to whom she was related then. She was not even a visiting friend. I couldn’t describe her in a way that would make her known in a photograph, nor would I recognize her if she walked into this room. But I have a memory of her and it’s like this: the color of her skin—the matte quality of it. Something purple around her. Also eyes not completely open. There emanated from her an aloofness that seemed to me kindly disposed. But most of all I remember her name—or the way people pronounced it. Never Hannah or Miss Peace. Always Hannah Peace—and more. Something hidden—some awe perhaps, but certainly some forgiveness. When they pronounced her name, they (the women and the men) forgave her something.
That’s not much, I know: half-closed eyes, an absence of hostility, skin powdered in lilac dust. But it was more than enough to evoke a character—in fact any more detail would have prevented (for me) the emergence of a fictional character at all. What is useful—definitive—is the galaxy of emotion that accompanied the woman as I pursued my memory of her; not the woman herself. (I am still startled by the ability—even the desire—to “use” acquaintances or friends or enemies as fictional characters. There is no yeast for me in a real-life person, or else there is so much it is not useful—it is done bread, already baked.)
The pieces (and only the pieces) are what begin the creative process for me. And the process by which the recollections of these pieces coalesce into a part (and knowing the difference between a piece and a part) is creation. Memory, then, no matter how small the piece remembered, demands my respect, my attention, and my trust.
I depend heavily on the ruse of memory (and in a way it does function as a creative writer’s ruse) for two reasons. One, because it ignites some process of invention, and two, because I cannot trust the literature and the sociology of other people to help me know the truth of my own cultural sources. It also prevents my preoccupations from descending into sociology. Since the discussion of black literature in critical terms is unfailingly sociology and almost never art criticism, it is important for me to shed those considerations from my work at the outset.
In the example I have given of Hannah Peace it was the having-been-easily-forgiven that caught my attention, not growing up black, and that quality, that “easily forgivenness” that I believe I remember in connection with a shadow of a woman my mother knew, is the theme of Sula. The women forgive each other—or learn to. Once that piece of the galaxy became apparent, it dominated the other pieces. The next step was to discover what there is to be forgiven among women. Such things must now be raised and invented because I am going to tell about feminine forgiveness in story form. The things to be forgiven are grave errors and violent misdemeanors, but the point is less the thing to be forgiven than the nature and quality of forgiveness among women—which is to say friendship among women. What one puts up with in a friendship is determined by the emotional value of the relationship. But Sula is not simply about friendship among women, but among black women, a qualifying term the artistic responsibilities of which I will touch upon in a moment.
I want my fiction to urge the reader into active participation in the nonnarrative, nonliterary experience of the text, which makes it difficult for the reader to confine himself to a cool and distant acceptance of data. When one looks at a very good painting, the experience of looking is deeper than the data accumulated in viewing it. The same, I think, is true in listening to good music. Just as the literary value of a painting or a musical composition is limited, so too is the literary value of literature limited. I sometimes think how glorious it must have been to have written drama in sixteenth-century England, or poetry in ancient Greece, or religious narrative in the Middle Ages, when literature was need and did not have a critical history to constrain or diminish the writer’s imagination. How magnificent not to have to depend on the reader’s literary associations—his literary experience—which can be as much an impoverishment of the reader’s imagination as it is of a writer’s. It is important that what I write not be merely literary. I am most self-conscious about making sure that I don’t strike literary postures. I avoid, too studiously perhaps, name-dropping, lists, literary references, unless oblique and based on written folklore. The choice of a tale or of folklore in my work is tailored to the character’s thoughts or actions in a way that flags him or her and provides irony, sometimes humor.
Milkman, about to meet the oldest black woman in the world, the mother of mothers who has spent her life caring for helpless others, enters her house thinking of a European tale, “Hansel and Gretel,” a story about parents who abandon their children to a forest and a witch who makes a diet of them. His confusion at that point, his racial and cultural ignorance, is flagged. Equally marked is Hagar’s bed, described as Goldilocks’s choice, partly because of Hagar’s preoccupations with hair, and partly because, like Goldilocks, a housebreaker if ever there was one, she is greedy for things, unmindful of property rights or other people’s space, and Hagar is emotionally selfish as well as confused.
This deliberate avoidance of literary references has become a firm if boring habit with me, not only because they lead to poses, not only because I refuse the credentials they bestow, but also because they are inappropriate to the kind of literature I wish to write, the aims of that literature, and the discipline of the specific culture that interests me. Literary references in the hands of writers I love can be extremely revealing, but they can also supply a comfort I don’t want the reader to have because I want him to respond on the same plane an illiterate or preliterate reader would. I want to subvert his traditional comfort so that he may experience an unorthodox one: that of being in the company of his own solitary imagination.
My beginnings as a novelist were very much focused on creating this discomfort and unease in order to insist that the reader rely on another body of knowledge. However weak those beginnings were in 1965, they nevertheless pointed me toward the process that engages me in 1984: trusting memory and culling from it theme and structure. In The Bluest Eye the recollection of what I felt and saw upon hearing a child my own age say she prayed for blue eyes provided the first piece. I then tried to distinguish between a piece and a part—in the sense that a piece of a human body is different from a part of a human body.
As I began developing parts out of pieces, I found that I preferred them unconnected—to be related but not to touch, to circle, not line up—because the story of this prayer was the story of a shattered, fractured perception resulting from a shattered, splintered life. The novel turned out to be a composition of parts circling one another, like the galaxy accompanying memory. I fret the pieces and fragments of memory because too often we want the whole thing. When we wake from a dream we want to remember all of it, although the fragment we are remembering may be, and very probably is, the most important piece in the dream. Chapter and part designations, as conventionally used in novels, were never very much help to me in writing. Nor are outlines. (I permit their use for the sake of the designer and for ease in talking about the book. They are usually identified at the last minute.)
There may be play and arbitrariness in the way memory surfaces but none in the way the composition is organized, especially when I hope to re-create play and arbitrariness in the way narrative events unfold. The form becomes the exact interp
retation of the idea the story is meant to express. There is nothing more traditional than that—but the sources of the images are not the traditional novelistic or readerly ones. The visual image of a splintered mirror, or the corridor of split mirrors in blue eyes, is the form as well as the context of The Bluest Eye.
Narrative is one of the ways in which knowledge is organized. I have always thought it was the most important way to transmit and receive knowledge. I am less certain of that now—but the craving for narrative has never lessened, and the hunger for it is as keen as it was on Mount Sinai or Calvary or in the middle of the fens. Even when novelists abandon or grow tired of it as an outmoded mimetic form, historians, journalists, and performing artists take up the slack. Still, narrative is not and never has been enough, just as the object drawn on a canvas or a cave wall is never simply mimetic.
My compact with the reader is not to reveal an already established reality (literary or historical) that he or she and I agree upon beforehand. I don’t want to assume or exercise that kind of authority. I regard that as patronizing, although many people regard it as safe and reassuring. And because my métier is black, the artistic demands of black culture are such that I cannot patronize, control, or pontificate. In the third-world cosmology as I perceive it, reality is not already constituted by my literary predecessors in Western culture.
If my work is to confront a reality unlike that received reality of the West, it must centralize and animate information discredited by the West—discredited not because it is not true or useful or even of some racial value, but because it is information held by discredited people, information dismissed as “lore” or “gossip” or “magic” or “sentiment.”
If my work is faithfully to reflect the aesthetic tradition of Afro-American culture, it must make conscious use of the characteristics of its art forms and translate them into print: antiphony, the group nature of art, its functionality, its improvisational nature, its relationship to audience performance, the critical voice that upholds tradition and communal values and that also provides occasion for an individual to transcend and/or defy group restrictions.
Working with those rules, the text, if it is to take improvisation and audience participation into account, cannot be the authority—it should be the map. It should make a way for the reader (audience) to participate in the tale. The language, if it is to permit criticism of both rebellion and tradition, must be both indicator and mask, and the tension between the two kinds of language is its release and its power. If my work is to be functional to the group (to the village, as it were) then it must bear witness and identify that which is useful from the past and that which ought to be discarded; it must make it possible to prepare for the present and live it out; and it must do that not by avoiding problems and contradictions but by examining them; it should not even attempt to solve social problems but it should certainly try to clarify them.
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; g
reat-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.
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