|
|
James Baldwin, who died at the age of 62 in 1987, is easily the
most powerful voice in the Black American novel before Nobel
Laureate, Toni Morrison. Risen out of the Harlem horrors to
hoist a moving discourse in American letters, he was fully
conscious of his "complex fate", assuming his
"aesthetic ministry", he invested his prose with awe
and thunder and prophecy. Indeed, to think of him is to think of
a ‘Black Hamlet’, pondering the history and destiny of him
race in a profoundly anguished but eloquent voice.
In his first
novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) there’s a
strong evangelical strain, and we find his mindset precludes
evasions, soft options and self-deceptions. Told through
flashbacks, the story of a 17-year old Harlem boy, John Grimes,
it becomes an amblematic surrogate for Baldwin himself. But in Giovanni’s
Room (1957), the Black fate gets conflated with Baldwin’s
own troubled sexuality. In the larger contest, it becomes a
metaphor for the politics of sex and the politics of power. In
his best book, Another Country (1962), racial, sexual and
societal strains converge to form a grand metaphor of appetite
and aggrandisement, and the title itself suggests a land of
alienation where the moral imperialism of the White race, and
the spiritual squalor and spoliation of the Blacks have combined
to create a geography of vicious bodies and parts. Leaving aside
his other novels, I turn to his prose piece The Fire Next
Time. There’s a touch of nobility in his anger, and a
touch of splendour in his song. He laments the eternal tragedy
of colour, and he concludes: "God
gave Noah the rainbow sign/No more water, the fire next
time."
Toni Morrison is
in the line of great American writers like James Baldwin, but
her form, style and vision are, if anything, more powerfully
structured, and her affirmations, amidst rage, tend to isolate
Baldwin’s rhetoric of wrath and his avangelical, prophetic
tone. The Nobel Prize came to her in the fullness of her genius
widely applauded in the media and in critical evaluations. Her
novels — The Bluest Eye, Sula, Tar Baby, Song of
Solomon, Beloved and Jazz make up a corpus of
astonishing artistry and reach. I intend, however, to add brief
comments only on the two books that had the strongest appeal Song
of Solomon and Beloved.
Song of Solomon
is an earlier novel and it’s chiefly the story of a Black
youth, nicknamed Milkman, whose father Macon Dead (mark the
tragic irony of names) is a boorish Black owner of blocks of
tenements, a cruel husband and overbearing father. Milkman’s
revolt takes time to come to a boil, but in the end he breaks
free and loose, and his tragic suicidal leap brings this
harrowing tale of Black suffering to its ineluctable end. Its
form is essentially that of Bildungsroman, a tale of
growing up and initiation, but unlike the stereotyped German
genre, it’s not a story of an individual and his self, but of
a bruised self within a community, within a shared destiny.
Thus, its form is fragmented and episodic, and there are sliding
panels within a time-scale. Brutalisation and bastardisation of
a people who have no history, no country, no future, brings
Milkman into contact with a secret Black group that believes in
"eye for eye", but he breaks free to discover his
identity, his race’s roots. It’s in the end and multiple
tragedy of love, of trust and of faith in the Church. The
Biblical title only confirms it. Song of Solomon is a
visionary novel and we see Morrison’s soaring imagination at
its best.
Beloved, a
Pulitzer-Prize winner, is the story of a young girl called Amy,
nicknamed Beloved, a runaway half-white whose mixed blood
creates a special type of agonising alienation. It’s as much
her story as that of Sethe who turns out to be her mother in the
end. Morrison’s deep penetrating psychological probings take
us inside the heads of different protagonists. The varied
strains make up a complex tapestry, and the story becomes
circular, the reader returning to the same situations as seen
from another angle. Beloved, described as "a
life-affirming" and "a mesmerising story", is one
of the best in Morrison’s canon.
In her critique of
"American Africanism" in a polemical essay, Playing
in the Dark Morrison observes that the White American
imagination needs a "nigger" to vindicate its own
power-structure, its unhappy ambivalence, and its dubious
metaphysics of human colonisation. Hence its technique of
gothicism, as in Faulkner, to complexify its spiritual unease.
|
