Campus vignetteIn pursuit of excellence: Scholarly presentations by our colleagues at international forums [Archives:2005/856/Education]

Dr Anil Prasad, Associate Professor and Chair, Department of English, Faculty of Arts, Ibb University attended (in April 2005) the 17th International Conference on Language, Linguistics, Translation and Literature at the University of Yarmouk, Irbid, Jordan. He presented a paper on Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon (1977). He has been invited to attend and give a paper on the topic “Ethnicity and the Novel: Politics and Poetics of Narrative” at the 2nd World Congress of the International American Studies Association at the University of Ottawa, Canada in August 2005.

Summary of Dr Prasad's paper on Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon:

Toni Morison's novels “measure the lives” of a marginalized community fraught with an ambivalent consciousness. This ambivalent consciousness has been depicted in the narratives of the Afro-American writers, in general, as pointed out by W.E.B.Du Bois as the expression of “double consciousness” of the black psyche, the “twoness- an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body” For this reason Henry Louis Gates, Jr. calls the black texts as ” two-toned” and “double-voiced”. Therefore, a “linear reading” of Morrison's narrative fiction will be misleading and the ambiguity and plurality of its voice and stance cannot be successfully reached at and explored. The complexities inherent in the double consciousness will be explored, the paper proposes, more fully and successfully by a non-linear reading, by what Edward Said calls “contrapuntal reading” of the Afro-American narratives particularly the narratives of the black women writers like Toni Morrison.

The paper has referred to Susan Willis' perceptive discovery that in Toni Morrison's novels language has been used as a “register for the experience of change” and has further examined it as the stylistic feature of Morrison that is used to challenge the “universalizing and the essentializing tendencies of the hegemonic white discourse”, to resist the oppressive monolithic discursive drives of the Western culture. On the surface, Morrison's Song of Solomon is unmistakably a story of postethnic slavery and racism. Metaphorically, it is more than that as it incorporates the complex realities of social change showing their influence on the two generations of Afro-Americans bringing the past in their lives alive and transformed, a means to transform their lives which might mitigate the double consciousness of a black psyche. The dualities might be dissolved, Morrison seems to suggest, throughout her story, by bringing about a change both from within and without. Wealth and social status give freedom but there is always a risk of wearing a white mask on a black skin as illustrated in the novel in the character of the protagonist's father. Therefore, there is a need to unmask the self, and to recreate new spaces of history and geography by reconnecting the past with the present for a future in which the Milkmans of today would not make themselves “invisible” thinking of what the others think of them instead they should be the active agents of change.

Unlike Ellison's invisible protagonist whose identity is shaped by how other people define him (” I'm invisible imply because people refuse to see me. I am neither dead nor in a state of suspended animation am in a state of hibernation” – from Ellison's Invisible Man (1952)) Milkman, the protagonist of Song of Solomon, aims to achieve “a total authentic personality”. Unlike his father, he refuses to be a kind of Ellisonian invisible man. He is an agent of change rather than of musings in a self-conscious cave of hibernation. He goes to the past to decipher the song of Solomon, to mend the course of a fractured and misrepresented history. Like Robert Frost's narrator in his poem “Directive” he drinks his “waters” and “be whole again beyond any confusion”. The song of Solomon is such a kind of “watering place” for Milkman. His going to the past, his symbolic act of rewriting of history, his changing the course of the Afro-African geographical and cultural locations is what Stuart Hall has called “the act of imaginative rediscovery” of the “hidden histories”. By sending Milkman from North to South Morrison as Dixon has rightly remarked “alters the direction of cultural history”. A new history of the country should be written, Morrison seems to emphasize, to mitigate the double consciousness of the black psyche. The threads of the unwritten history would be brought together to explore new spaces where identities are not based on synecdoche of colour, where “color-line” is not considered as a cultural signifier.

In Song of Solomon Morrison uses the motif of flying ( the myth of the flying African) throughout the narrative from the abortive mock-heroic flight, in the opening of the novel, of the insurance agent Robert Smith from the roof of Mercy Hospital to the heroic flight of the agent of change Milkman from Solomon's Leap at the end of the novel. Morrison's use of this popular myth defamiliarizes the earlier legendry black Icarus image of the flying African from authority and repression by envisioning a future through a folkloric, historical tradition in which an individual can be empowered with “a new sense of self-ownership”.

Morrison's Song of Solomon is not merely a remapping of the historical and geographical space but a further extension of the boundaries of historical and geographical space from the “the narrative of hibernation” towards the narrative of self-creation and cultural transformation.. The boundaries of the conventional teleological progression of the storyline is also extended and recharted by the inclusion of postmodernist, mythical, folkloric and magico-realistic modes of storytelling which Henry Louis Gates Jr. has called as the employment of “lyrical superrealism” in Morrison's narrative fiction. The paper concludes: this “might help us begin to move beyond racial essentialism, beyond the repressive politics of identity”.
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