Phil Philips' R&B jam, "Sea of Love," was also covered by the Heptones, a Jamaican ska and reggae from in the 1960s.
Here is the original 1959 version of the song:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EroRtEUmZcU
It's standard doo wop/R&B of the 1950s, but with an amazing vocalist and great melody
Here is the Heptones' version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wHb-SH2skE&feature=related
They change it up a bit with the reggae beat and their accented vocals are definitely not as pleasing as Phil Phillips.
Wednesday, November 9, 2011
Monday, November 7, 2011
It Don't Mean a Thing If It Ain't Got that Swing
I love Duke Ellington. I've loved him since middle school, when I was immediately overwhelmed with pride in this urbane and sophisticated black man. Living in an era where black men were thought of as unsophisticated and uneducated brutes, Duke dressed well, composed and played brilliant music, and rejected white American views of blacks as savage primitives. Although he was forced into profiting from the image of black inferiority to make a living in the 1920s and early 30s in his Cotton Club-era days, Duke must have been fully aware that the "jungle" music his band played for whites touring Harlem was an expression of black urban civilization. The appellation "jungle" was imposed by white club owners and people like his manager when he left Washington, D.C. for New York City, Irving Mills. Mills's exploitative contract with Duke gave him 50% ownership for just publishing his music, though Mills sometimes wrote lyrics for Duke's compositions. Either way, like blacks throughout American history, Duke could play the "Tom" to further advance his career and keep his band going.
In addition to dealing with a racist music industry, Duke was able to maintain relevant and essential in jazz for several decades: from the early 1920s in Washington until his death in New York in the 1970s. Duke never forgot his origins during this period either, identifying and composing material based on the urban black experience, blues music, ragtime, swing, and the lives of the New Negro described by Alain Locke during the Harlem Renaissance. Jazz musicians like Duke were the soundtrack for the literary and philosophical texts of the Harlem Renaissance, since their music was a fusion of the different experiences, musics, and cultures of the Southern Negro in the urban North. One must remember that most of the Negroes in Harlem during this period were recent migrants from the South and the Caribbean, so their combined experiences and regional cultures merged to form the black urban world of jazz and a discourse of counterculture espousing independent black art and literary forms not based on European standards. This is the period in which black poets used the blues form, black artists pursued independent and African-derived models for inspiration, and writers used the black vernacular and folk tradition to create something new instead of regurgitating the products of Western thought. Music, such as jazz, was also part of this innovative approach to black aesthetics. Duke Ellington and others, though entertainers at heart, also composed art music, suites, and experimented with various musical forms and genres to create something new based on the African-American and human experience.
Duke's role in innovative jazz music was part of this new black aesthetic. Always aimed at a general audience and with a message of happiness and joy in the human condition, Duke chronicled the history of Black America through his suites and compositions. He also embraced Latin and world music multiple times in his career. Hiring Juan Tizol, a Puerto-Rican trombonist, led to some of the first Latin-infused swing of the 1930s and 1940s (of course Latin influences have been present in jazz since the 1920s because of the Caribbean connections of New Orleans to the playing styles and rhythms of the West Indies). Compositions by Tizol like "Caravan" and "Perdido," for example, show Duke's willingness to try new things and use his orchestra as an instrument itself, through his arrangements for the band. Duke's band, under the influence of trumpeter Bubber Miley, was one of the first to develop "jungle music" in the 1920s by using plunger mutes to create growling sounds and effects that evoked African "savagery" for whites slumming it up in Harlem but were a stylistic effect creatively used by jazz musicians for decades. Indeed, these special sounds and often bluesy effects likely influenced the honking sounds of R&B and early rock saxophone playing, in addition to free jazz in the music of Ornette Coleman.
Furthermore, Duke's use of the orchestra as an instrument to create multiple textures or colors of sound in a recording is a technique Charles Mingus adopted for his own groups, which is self-evident on Mingus's Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, an epic suite exploring his musical roots: Ellington, Latin, classical, flamenco, and blues. Ellington also influenced the entire big band period of the 1930s and 1940s because he was composing "swing" numbers since the 1920s. Later in life, when bebop and its progeny dominated the jazz scene, Duke worked with contemporary musicians such as John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, and Max Roach to revive some of his older compositions in the newer jazz idioms and to illustrate that the older generation could still be avant-garde and experimental despite the perceived limitations of swing and big bands. He proved he could still write (with collaborations from Billy Strayhorn and others as well) and play with various suites dedicated to different continents as well, such as the Far Eastern Suite, which was well-received in the jazz community.
Duke's ultimate message of love and happiness was expressed by his desire to spread jazz around the globe. He willingly participated with the diplomacy jazz tours of the United States government despite ongoing civil rights setbacks to disseminate jazz because at its core it is celebratory music of the human capacity to create. The structure of the music is also very democratic because of the call and response tradition, and individual expression or improvisation within the group context. If that does not define a music rooted in innate human abilities to love, cooperate, and create for the sake of the collective then Duke Ellington's life was meaningless. His involvement in spreading jazz was also related to civil rights activism. Though his contributions are often overlooked, Duke's group traveled via bus across the country when Jim Crow was king. His band had to face racist whites at every possible corner, and his rise to fame and support for black causes was always present in his music. Indeed, many of his compositions draw on the realities of urban black life in Harlem, and one of his famous suites, Black, Brown, and Beige, based on African-American history, was performed at Carnegie Hall in the early 1940s. Moreover, Duke's message of love manifested itself in support for civil rights groups by benefit concerts and a growing pan-African consciousness reflected in song titles and styles, as the song "Fleurette Africaine" suggests.
Some of Duke's most important songs were not composed by him. In fact, I have heard that he false claimed some songs as his own, but regardless of those negligible errors, his musical legacy is defined by his ability to choose great musicians and organize them in a way to produce the best music of the swing era. Songs like "Solitude," "It Don't Mean a Thing If It Ain't Got that Swing," "Mood Indigo," "Things Ain't What They Used to Be," "Drop Me Off in Harlem," "Do Nothing 'Til You Hear from Me," "Fleurette Africaine," "Caravan," "Perdido," "Ad Lib on Nippon", "East Saint Louis Toodle-oo," "Jungle Nights in Harlem," and "In a Sentimental Mood" are proof of a legacy of musical genius in my book. Many of his songs have entered popular culture lexicon and are jazz standards.
"Take the A Train," a Billy Strayhorn number about taking the A train to get to Harlem, became the group's theme song in the 1940s.
"In a Sentimental Mood" is best heard in a duo performance of Duke and John Coltrane
"It Don't Mean a Thing If It Ain't Got that Swing" kicked off the swing craze
"Jungle Nights in Harlem," from the late 1920s, is an example of Duke's "jungle" phase with hot rhythms, muted brass, and wild clarinet glissandos that were meant to evoke imagery of primitive black Africans for white consumers at the Cotton Club.
Duke Ellington's famous performance of "Diminuendo in Blue" at Newport in the 1950s rightly deserves all the praise. Saxophonist Paul Gonsalves wails and wails and takes the audience into an almost religious experience, like an African-American revival. Pure ecstasy and joy here.
"Fleurette Africaine" deserves the critical praise as well, since this avant-garde gem features both Mingus and Max Roach, two new school musicians who nevertheless loved Duke Ellington since they grew up on his music.
Concerning Toni Morrison's Beloved
Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer-winning novel, Beloved, is another great work. Inspired by the historical Margaret Sanger, a runaway slave who killed her infant child rather than have her child return to slavery with her living, was the historical basis for the novel’s character, Sethe, and her deceased daughter, Beloved. The historical Margaret Sanger stood up for her freedom and did what she thought was necessary to preserve it, by any means possible. In fact, her sanity and lack of repentance for murdering the infant (and trying to kill her other children) made her a cause celebre for abolitionists opposed to the Fugitive Slave Act (Morrison xviiI). Morrison’s book, set in the years after the Civil War in small-town Ohio, focuses on the impact of slavery on the ex-slaves and their families. Beloved is a powerful portrayal of slavery’s destructive effects on black families as well, dividing couples by not recognizing slave marriages as legitimate and selling or trading slaves to divide parents and children. Thus, the novel personifies slavery by giving characters born out of the institution and showing how their lives were harmed by it decades after emancipation. Furthermore, Morrison again employs elements of magic realism, stream of consciousness prose, and poetic language to share the world of Sethe, Denver, Paul D, Beloved, Baby Suggs, and Stamp Paid.
Morrison’s novel treats slave resistance and abolition in a fascinating and historically accurate manner. Sethe and her husband’s method of escape was through individual forms of resistance, running away. Sethe’s husband, Halle, worked to save up money to purchase his elderly mother’s freedom on the plantation in Kentucky, Sweet Home, which is a very ironic name for a plantation. His mother, Baby Suggs, moves to Ohio, and waits for Sethe and Halle to flee the plantation and join her later. Unfortunately, things do not play out well for the family. Sethe manages to escape while pregnant with her two sons, Howard and Buglar and Beloved. With a little help from a white woman who helps her give birth to Denver while fleeing to Ohio alone, she eventually crosses paths with Stamp Paid and his nephew, black conductors on the Underground Railroad, who ensure her safe passage across the Ohio River. The fact that Stamp Paid is a black man serving as a conductor on the Underground Railroad illustrates the importance of black agency and abolitionism during the antebellum period. Too often the Underground Railroad and the abolitionist movement is presented as if only whites, Harriet Tubman, and Frederick Douglas were involved. Countless unnamed individuals participated in the Underground Railroad to free blacks during the dangerous last decades of American slavery.
The brutality of slavery is also closely analyzed here. Sethe is separated from her mother and never learns who her father is because she is sold and brought to a different plantation. Her only recollection of her mother is being violently struck by her while a young child, which initially confuses her until she herself realizes the brutality of a system that denies women the right to be mothers. Obviously anyone with a basic understanding of the history of slavery (except maybe Michelle Bachmann and conservative pro-life organizations) understands that the slave trade divided families and was unbelievably detrimental to black family structures. Obviously infanticide became common as a method of resistance since mothers knew their children could be taken away at any time. Rather than raise a child that one will never actually get the chance to love and who could be separated from her at any time, many enslaved mothers chose to kill their children rather than raise them in slavery, as the historical example of Margaret Sanger illustrates. Sethe’s attempt to kill her children when slave catchers come for her in Ohio, however, earns her the scorn of the black community, many thinking she is insane for attempting to kill her children and succeeding to do so in the case of Beloved. Even Baby Suggs, Sethe’s mother-in-law, distances herself from Sethe and interacts with the town’s local black community more. Sethe’s sons abandon her at age 12 and 13 to find their own way in the world, knowing that there was something wrong with their mother and the house in which they lived. And they were correct: the ghost of Beloved returns initially as a friend of Denver in the home, and later, once Paul D and Sethe start a relationship, as the family returns from a harvest festival. Beloved is taken in by the family despite Paul D’s reservations, and although Sethe does not know at first, they all realize that she’s the same daughter killed several years ago.
The impact of slavery on Paul D is also presented as a cause for his independent, drifting lifestyle. Never having control of his own body due to white men controlling his labor first through slavery and later chain gangs, Paul D’s conception of freedom is the ability to roam and decide what to do with his own life, which affects his relationship with women as well. His drifter lifestyle prevents him from spending too much time in any place, so he inevitably leaves his lovers in the dust to continue his solitary existence, but with Sethe found temporary solace because of their mutual experiences at the plantation. Living with Sethe for several months almost settled him down, but his desire to control his own life and ultimately Sethe and Denver is resisted by Beloved, who eventually gets Sethe and Denver to completely devote themselves to her care. Perhaps Morrison is criticizing black masculinity defined as male control of the family and women here, since Paul D cannot stand Beloved, although with some good reason.
Beloved does appear out of the blue, and the novel never answers the question of her ultimate origin. A white man in the area had molested a black woman who later escaped, but the novel never establishes if Beloved is that black woman in question, thereby illustrating Morrison’s use of magic realism in Beloved like in so many of her novels. The question of her being the same girl she killed is never doubted by Sethe and Denver, who devote their lives to her happiness as a result of love “too thick” and guilt on Sethe’s part. Beloved herself provides an interesting example of how the characters see her as a part of Sethe’s fractured psyche and their own histories and identities, forcing blacks to remember slavery in their own pasts. Perhaps that is another reason Paul D could not stand her because her existence is a constant reminder of his slave past, when white men controlled every aspect of his existence.
In addition, slavery’s destructive impact on black lives manifests itself through the imposition of false identity. Sethe, Paul D, Halle, and others lived through imposed identities that dehumanize. For some, succumbing to imposed identities of worthlessness overcome, as Halle succumbs instead of fleeing. He ends up lying in the butter, forgetting his autonomous agency as a human being. For Sethe, who never accepted racial inferiority, defines herself by running away from the plantation and living her own life, regardless of what any whites or men say. Baby Suggs, a slave for most of her life who had most of her children sold, uses her liberty to serve the black community of her new home, dedicating herself to her fellow oppressed blacks. Baby Suggs service to the community belies a belief in black equality and humanity, which deserves better conditions beyond the forced labor of slavery that denied blacks control of their own families.
Beloved is a dense work. I read it near the end of summer 2011, so I think I need to reread it before I can write a proper critique or essay. My recollection of events and characters is poor, so I cannot construct a truly good critique. Nevertheless, the novel is based on something that really occurred, and is a powerful testament to endurance of human spirit under the most harrowing of conditions. Morrison’s treatment of slavery is also more realistic in that it considers various black responses to the system as well, including black agency through runaways, Underground Railroad black conductors, and the traumatic experience of being separated from one’s children. For Sethe, she does not look back on her decision to kill her child, knowing fully well that it is better to die rather than submitting to a dehumanizing system. The presence of magic realism is also everywhere in the novel since it is never established who Beloved truly is. Is she really the daughter of Sethe who was killed several years ago? The ambiguity of Beloved identity perhaps symbolizes the ambiguity of our individual identies, or how the past is often forgotten despite its powerful connection to the present. Indeed, at the end of Beloved, nobody in the town can recall her, despite several interactions with her. We ignore our past and fail to learn from the mistakes, but they always remain a part of us, even if we are not aware, which has obvious implications for African-Americans, who may not know their own slave roots but remain a part of our collective consciousness.
Sunday, November 6, 2011
Concerning Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon
“Hitler’s the most natural white man in the world. He killed Jews and Gypsies because he didn’t have us. Can you see those Klansmen shocked by him? No, you can’t.
Morrison did it again. She crafted another masterpiece novel. Song of Solomon is unlike her other works for featuring a male protagonist and perspective, and for its urban setting. Reading her other works, such as Beloved and Sula, one grows accustomed to rural and small-town settings for characters. Solomon is set in urban Michigan, and its uncertain which city. Perhaps Detroit, but there is not enough definitive information to ascertain the city. Regardless of the urban habitat, the story is unique for focusing on manhood and the male perspective on the purpose of life. Indeed, the story is a coming of age novel about Macon "Milkman" Dead, who moves beyond his naive and selfish extended childhood to learn to care about others and trying to understand the world from another's perspective. Thus, the novel draws on 20th century African-American urban life and oral traditions to deliver a message of universal love and compassion.
Macon "Milkman" Dead III is referred to as Milkman because his mother kept breastfeeding him until he was about seven years old. Freddie, a local black man, saw Milkman and his mother, Ruth, in the act, and his nickname for Macon III became common around the city's black community. His parents have a loveless marriage filled with scorn, physical abuse, and lack of understanding that creates a dysfunctional family. After the birth of his two older sisters, Corinthians and Magdalene 13 and 12 years before his birth, his parents' marriage fell apart. Ruth, the daughter of the first colored doctor in the city, and light-skinned like her father, inherits his disdain for the darker-skinned and lower class Negroes. The good doctor only accepted Macon Dead II as husband for his daughter because of his middle-class background and the fact that he himself was apparently uncomfortable with the closeness of his daughter to him as she ages. Ruth's inheritance of color prejudice and class prejudice mostly prevent her from loving and understanding others.
Macon II, Milkman's father, believes the purpose of manhood is acquire things at the cost of others, so his materialistic approach to understanding others prevents him from showing compassion for lower class blacks and learning to not exploit others. Indeed, Macon II Dead exploits his tenants in his apartments he accumulates to enrich himself at the expense of proper living conditions and community relations. His pursuit of wealth and the exploitative capitalist system to get the respect of whites ultimately fails him as well. When he goes to prison to free his son after foolishly telling him to rob his sister, Pilate, he assumes his accumulation of wealth and high status as an African-American will lead to white acceptance of him. Macon assumes his wealth and name was the reason the police freed Milkman from prison, but in fact his wealth and reputation among whites due to his higher economic status had nothing to do with Macon. Macon also attempts to behave like whites when he buys lakefront summer property for vacations, the first colored man in the city to do so. He believes that if he keeps accumulating wealth he will then be accepted by whites and receive additional credit and loans from white-controlled banks to allow him to further enrich himself. Obviously, his materialistic relations with others prevent him from loving others, or forming real relationships. Anyone who believes the only meaning in life is to acquire more and more will not have real relationships with other human beings.
Unfortunately, for most of Milkman's young life, his approach to understanding human relations and love is soured by that of his parents, and his best friend, Guitar. Guitar, as motherless child raised by his grandmother after both his parents die, is penniless and leads a very immature and rather hedonistic lifestyle until the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s radicalizes him. Guitar's grandmother rents from Milkman's father, and despite his low class origins, Milkman and him continue their friendship, much to Ruth's chagrin. Unlike Guitar, who grows to accept violence as a necessary part of the human condition and race relations, Milkman remains an immature, selfish, and lazy youth. His father employs him after high school in the real estate business, and his mother and sisters lavish him with attention and praise so he lives an idle life of drinking, partying, sex, and constant financial support from his well-to-do father.
His friendship with Guitar begins to fall apart as Guitar begins to sound more and more like Malcolm X, especially concerning the innate evil in whites. For Guitar, whites are incorrigible devils whose violence must be met with violence to preserve the racial ratio. Moreover, for whites, black men are only to be silenced or killed, and every white, including Kennedy, or "innocent" white children and women, have the potential to kill and lynch blacks. Indeed, after the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham that killed four girls, Guitar and his organization of black assassins, the Seven Days, desire to kill four white girls with explosives to restore the racial ratio, meaning that since killing a human being eliminates their chances for reproducing, killing whites will keep their population growth static. Of course Guitar realizes that blacks are outnumbered by whites in America, but on a global level, blacks and people of color outnumber whites, therefore they outnumber Caucasians. Thus, Guitar's adult years are marked by a consuming violence that eventually expands to include non-whites (despite his claims to Milkman that he only kills whites, and only after Negroes are murdered by whites. Contradicting himself, Guitar claims to kill random whites out of retribution due to his love for blacks, but his violence and hatred of whites corrupts his personal relationships with everyone, perhaps proving that Martin Luther King's message of universal love and compassion is a better approach to human and race relations than outright violence and hatred. In fact, Guitar's wrath later spreads to Milkman, his best friend, despite their mutual blackness, due to Guitar believing Milkman had not given him promised gold from his father and Pilate's past, which would have been used by Guitar to purchase explosives to kill four white girls.
Hagar, the granddaughter of Pilate and therefore cousin of Milkman, represents another type of love, or approach to human relationships. Spoiled by her mother Reba and grandmother, Hagar initially shows no interest in Milkman, who adores her from the first minute he lays eyes on her. Eventually, she grows to love him in a possessive manner, which drives Milkman away from her. He immaturely ends their relationship through an email, driving her into an anger-fueled passion to murder him, lasting for over a year. She ultimately perishes after never accepting life without the man she loved, thereby illustrating another self-destructive type of love. She, who loves Milkman so much she no longer cares for herself, represents a type of selfless love that is too selfless, leading to her depression and eventual death. She dies, ironically, after beautifying herself in an attempt to win Milkman back. Her devotion to Milkman causes her to not care for her body, thus catching a fever after walking in the rain in her newly purchased clothes. Interestingly, Guitar tells Milkman that black women, like whites, try to control black men's lives as well, although unlike whites, black women do not want to silence or kill them. Instead, black women want to "settle them down" and force them into monogamous relationships where the man is completely dedicated to them. There are some truths to that, perhaps, in the case of Milkman and Hagar, but it's more obvious that this type of possessive and selfless love is destructive and not ideal for either party.
Pilate, aunt of Milkman and younger sister of Macon II, may be the only character in the novel who truly loves universally and endeavors to connect with all human beings. Unlike her brother, she values all human life, and treats everyone equally, including Ruth and her nephew. Indeed, she saves Milkman twice: before he is born when his angry father was trying to stop his birth through domestic abuse of Ruth, and later when he is in prison for stealing a green sack in her home that her brother belives to be the gold of an old white man he killed in self-defense when they were living in the South. The green sack surprisingly contains the bones of what both Macon and Pilate believe to be the old white man from that frightening night outside of Danville, Pennsylvania in their youths, after their father had died and left them homeless and penniless. Ironically, the woman named for Pilate, the man who ordered the crucifixion of Christ, is the most merciful and a staunch defender of the inherent value in human life. She, who was eventually separated from her brother after the death of the old white man for her refusal to take his gold, lives an independent life traveling across the United States. Born minutes after her mother died, she lacks a navel, which leads to some black communities expelling her for her lack of a navel later in life. Nevertheless, she never excludes herself from others, and embraces her lower class fellow Negroes in the northern town in Michigan. She even cares for her brother and his wife, despite not having a relationship with Macon due to his anger at her for not allowing him to take the gold.
According to Milkman, his aunt Pilate is the only one who truly flies in his life, since her message of universal love transcends material and destructive relationships. Milkman, on the other hand, remains a selfish and destructive man until he undergoes a journey home, to discover his father's family roots in Pennsylvania and Virginia. Taking the archetypal journey to ultimately discover himself and real manhood forces Milkman to not rely on his father's wealth and actually live autonomously, thereby also making him mature. He takes this journey in his thirties, which is later than usual for the cosmogonic cycle. Of course Milkman's initial reasons for taking the journey were self-centered and materialistic: he believes the gold from the old white man is still waiting at the cave in Pennsylvania where Pilate and Macon split several decades ago. Later, after realizing that neither his grandfather's bones nor the gold are not in the cave, Milkman continues his journey south to Virginia, in search of his grandfather and grandmother's roots. After multiple trials and tribulations, including thievery, conflicts with Southern blacks disdainful or wealthy northern blacks, and an angry Guitar, who thinks Milkman found the gold and shipped it with no intention of sharing with him, and including discussions with wise elders, Milkman eventually discovers his origins in the small town of Shalimar in the hills of Virginia. He discovers that his aunt, Pilate, actually has the bones of her father, Macon I, in the green sack she has in her home, and that his grandmother, who was half Indian, Singing Bird, had left Shalimar with Macon I, whose real name was Jake, a dark-skinned exslave without a father. Indeed, Milkman finds the solution to his quest from the least likely source: the rhyme sung by children about a mythical Solomon, a flying African slave who had 21 children, including Jake. According to the oral traditions and the song sung by the children in Shalimar, Solomon tried to fly away with Jake in his arms, but dropped him after hitting a tree, leaving him to be raised by Heddy, the Indian grandmother of Singing Bird.
Upon discovering his family’s origins and that his own great-grandfather had the ability of flight, something Milkman has endeavored to possess his whole life after being born the same day an insane life insurance agent for North Carolina Mutual jumped to his death from the roof of a building in his hometown, rushes home to tell his father and Pilate, who return to bury the Macon I in the near the cave outside of Danville where he was killed. While burying her there, Guitar appears again, and shoots Pilate after the burial is complete. The novel ends with Milkman leaping from the ledge of the cave above Guitar, and its unclear if Milkman really “flies” or falls to his death like Icarus. Regardless, Milkman completes the cosmogonic cycle by as he “flies” into the abyss, or soars above the heavens. He is freed from living the meaningless existence without love that characterized him prior to the journey.
Song of Solomon is essentially an exploration of love, and the flying African motif that appears in African-American, Afro-Caribbean, and Afro-Latin American slave narratives and oral traditions. In fact, the flying African appears in the United States, Cuba, and Jamaica, and likely influenced magic realism in Latin American literature, especially in the works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and other writers from areas with culturally significant populations of African descent, including Caribbean Colombia. Flight in this case, does not have to remain literal, but perhaps a transcendence or elevation of human moral character, such as in the case of Pilate, or Milkman near the end of the novel. It also clearly refers to the liberation of African slaves, back to Africa, their homeland free of racial slavery and the collapse of human relations that occurred in the dehumanizing conditions of slavery, which actually dehumanized whites rather than blacks by displaying the cruelty and savagery of the white man’s heart. Solomon, the great-grandfather and progenitor of 21 children, whose progeny are spread all over the town of Shalimar, carry on his legacy of flight and love in their relationships, although one could question his decision to leave his wife and children in slavery while he flew away to Africa alone as unethical. In the end, nobody knows if Solomon really flew back to Africa, but the widespread belief in flying Africans during slavery and in the present by residents of Shalimar symbolized resistance and hope for blacks. The struggle is to achieve flight as a way for collective liberation, instead of personal freedom as Solomon does, which leads to the death of his wife Ryna due to grief. Like his great-grandfather, Milkman does the same thing to Hagar: he “flies” away to the South on the search for his roots but leaves her behind, leaving her to die. Thus, Pilate, who learns to fly without ever leaving the ground, is the true master of flight since she pursues collective freedom rather than individual happiness.
As one would expect from Morrison, feminist themes are omnipresent as well. Her critique of black males’ abuse of black women appears in the relationships of Milkman and his father with their relationships with Ruth, and their sisters. Until his journey of self-discovery, Milkman only saw women as a means for obtaining pleasure, and did not respond with proper maturity or respect to Hagar’s affection. Other men, like Macon II, use physical abuse and their power of strength and wealth to control women, never realizing their oppression of women and how it prevents real love by perpetuating the racial hierarchy and gender oppression. Milkman’s sister, Corinthians, for example, has to hide her relationship with a lower class dark black man from her parents even though she is over fourty years old because they would not accept a working class, dark-skinned man as an acceptable partner. Morrison also highlights the importance of naming in African-American culture. Blacks attach importance to names because it becomes eternal, something that will live on after death, such as Solomon and his story of flight, which survives through the children’s song, or Ruth’s father, whose street is called Not Doctor Street by the colored community. In addition, Morrison addresses issues of race, class, color prejudice within the black community, and magic realism manifests itself in the tales of flight, ancient midwives from antebellum days, ghosts, and Pilate’s lack of a navel. The most amazing thing about the novel is how easily most people accept flight as possible. Indeed, when Robert Smith leaps to his death while wearing his blue wings, none of the Negroes in the crowd thought of it as a suicide attempt, but something that was entirely possible, perhaps due to the longstanding belief in flying Africans as literal and metaphorical in slavery as a means of achieving freedom. Indeed, the flying motif appears in African-American spirituals such as “All God’s Chillun Got Wings,” folklore, and literature before and after Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon.
Ultimately, the most important message in the book is really one of love. A universal love and understanding that neither excludes whites nor women is required to change daily human interactions and make a better world. Social change cannot come through undeserved violence taken out on whites, nor anyone else. One must move beyond narrow-minded self-interest, accumulation for the sake of growth, violent retribution, and self-destructive love to embrace universal compassion and empathy and create a meaningful existence. If one cannot connect to other human beings, then there is no purpose in life.
Friday, November 4, 2011
Nat Turner
Nat Turner: Hero or Villain?
So we all know that in 1831 Nat Turner led a slave rebellion in Southampton County, Virginia. Turner, inspired by radical African-American Christian messianism, was inspired to lead the revolt in August that led to deaths of unfortunately, too few Virginia whites. Perhaps 50-60 whites were killed, a disproportionate number of them being women and children. During the actual rebellion, less than a hundred free blacks and slaves joined in the violence, initially using knives, hatchets and blunt instruments to avoid arousing suspicion. They swept through different homes, killing as many whites as possible and liberated the slaves.
Nat Turner himself was literate and believer in the Black Christian anti-slavery movement that inspired slave revolts in Jamaica during the same period (Christmas Uprising or Baptist War, led by Samuel Sharpe, who was a Baptist preacher like Nat Turner). Since he believed he was chosen for a special mission of liberation by God, some may see him as a religious fanatic and see little value in celebrating his life. On the contrary, Turner’s Christian beliefs represent the best of 19th century Christianity by espousing a quick, radicalizing affront to human life to demonstrate the violence and inhumanity of the slave regime. Though he killed supposedly innocent beneficiaries of the slavocracy, Turner represented the best in Christian tradition with a thorough rejection of injustice in the present rather than waiting for a brighter times in the distant future. Without a brutal,dehumanizing assault on white life (including relatively innocent women and children), white abolitionists and moderates in the North would have taken longer to realize the importance of ending slavery sooner rather than later, especially after the brutal white reprisals taken against blacks throughout the South and the toughening of anti-free black laws and harsher penalties further polarized the United States.
In addition, white Americans, at least in the South, would have heard of the Baptist Uprising in Jamaica, a 10-day slave rebellion involving 60,000 of Jamaica’s 300,000 slaves. This enormous revolt, starting peacefully as a strike, quickly showed the importance of emancipation sooner rather than later or face additional widespread revolts and work stoppages. Or to go back even further, the 1816 Bussa Rebellion in Barbados and the successful Haitian Revolution provided frightening possibile futures for Euro-Americans if slavery continued unabated: enormous ‘race wars’ and so-called “savage” black vengeance taken in the form of the feared black rape of white women and all other horrors (which were things actually done by white men against black slaves, particularly sexual abuse and rape of women and girls, and excessive and cruel punishment of course). So the specter of Haiti was always present in the pysche of white Southerners, causing excessively brutal crackdowns on slave conspiracies and actual revolts (including the largest revolt in American history, the 1811 Louisiana revolt led by a slave from Saint Domingue (Haiti) that included 500 slaves) Thus, white Southerners were right to fear the “contamination of American blacks and slaves with the example of Haiti, even in cases where slaves knew little about Haiti. Indeed, free blacks were the African-Americans who often knew the most about Haiti, particularly early black nationalists such as Denmark Vesey and free black communities in northern cities who celebrated Haiti’s day of independence instead of the Fourth of July. Nat Turner, as a literate man influenced by Vesey and presumably knowledgeable about the largest slave revolt in the Atlantic world, would likely have known the importance of violence, including violence against so-called innocent whites as necessary for the success of the Haitian Revolution.
Of course this is morally questionable territory Nat Turner put himself in when he and his followers murdered white women and children. One would assume his Christian preacher background would have deterred violence taken out against children, but remember that the slaveholders also called themselves “Christians” yet held people in bondage. If one focuses on what may be considered moral hypocrisy in the case of Nat Turner and other violent slave rebellions, why not focus on the even larger moral and political hypocrisy of the United States? Besides, the unarmed white women and children were still part of slaveholding families, and although the children did not choose to be members of a repugnant racist class, the murdering of women and children was easier to achieve than armed white militias, who eventually did defeat our heroes Nat Turner and company. And perhaps Fanon had it right; violence as a means of raising consciousness and a rejection of the colonizer/oppressor is a vital step. Unfortunately, the majority of enslaved African-Americans did not rise up in violent revolt, but that would have been unrealistic anyway given the lack of access to weapons and the huge hurdles facing large-scale slave rebellions in the expanse of North America. Raising a revolutionary consciousness of resistance could take multiple forms, including the much easier individual flight, infanticide, work stoppages and a counterculture or resistance in religion.
Ultimately, most African-Americans view Nat Turner as a hero for his valiant effort to overthrow slavery in Southhampton, although it may have seemed as audacious and foolish as John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry. Another one of the consequences the Virginia Assembly enacted on slave populations was requiring white clergy to be present at black religious gatherings, in a vain attempt to control black Christianity. So Nat Turner was indeed a hero, despite some morally-questionable actions taken by his group. Although something like 200 blacks throughout the South were killed in the retaliation by white mobs and vigilantes, Turner pushed white America and the enslaved population toward the necessary Civil War to end slavery once and for all.
So we all know that in 1831 Nat Turner led a slave rebellion in Southampton County, Virginia. Turner, inspired by radical African-American Christian messianism, was inspired to lead the revolt in August that led to deaths of unfortunately, too few Virginia whites. Perhaps 50-60 whites were killed, a disproportionate number of them being women and children. During the actual rebellion, less than a hundred free blacks and slaves joined in the violence, initially using knives, hatchets and blunt instruments to avoid arousing suspicion. They swept through different homes, killing as many whites as possible and liberated the slaves.
Nat Turner himself was literate and believer in the Black Christian anti-slavery movement that inspired slave revolts in Jamaica during the same period (Christmas Uprising or Baptist War, led by Samuel Sharpe, who was a Baptist preacher like Nat Turner). Since he believed he was chosen for a special mission of liberation by God, some may see him as a religious fanatic and see little value in celebrating his life. On the contrary, Turner’s Christian beliefs represent the best of 19th century Christianity by espousing a quick, radicalizing affront to human life to demonstrate the violence and inhumanity of the slave regime. Though he killed supposedly innocent beneficiaries of the slavocracy, Turner represented the best in Christian tradition with a thorough rejection of injustice in the present rather than waiting for a brighter times in the distant future. Without a brutal,dehumanizing assault on white life (including relatively innocent women and children), white abolitionists and moderates in the North would have taken longer to realize the importance of ending slavery sooner rather than later, especially after the brutal white reprisals taken against blacks throughout the South and the toughening of anti-free black laws and harsher penalties further polarized the United States.
In addition, white Americans, at least in the South, would have heard of the Baptist Uprising in Jamaica, a 10-day slave rebellion involving 60,000 of Jamaica’s 300,000 slaves. This enormous revolt, starting peacefully as a strike, quickly showed the importance of emancipation sooner rather than later or face additional widespread revolts and work stoppages. Or to go back even further, the 1816 Bussa Rebellion in Barbados and the successful Haitian Revolution provided frightening possibile futures for Euro-Americans if slavery continued unabated: enormous ‘race wars’ and so-called “savage” black vengeance taken in the form of the feared black rape of white women and all other horrors (which were things actually done by white men against black slaves, particularly sexual abuse and rape of women and girls, and excessive and cruel punishment of course). So the specter of Haiti was always present in the pysche of white Southerners, causing excessively brutal crackdowns on slave conspiracies and actual revolts (including the largest revolt in American history, the 1811 Louisiana revolt led by a slave from Saint Domingue (Haiti) that included 500 slaves) Thus, white Southerners were right to fear the “contamination of American blacks and slaves with the example of Haiti, even in cases where slaves knew little about Haiti. Indeed, free blacks were the African-Americans who often knew the most about Haiti, particularly early black nationalists such as Denmark Vesey and free black communities in northern cities who celebrated Haiti’s day of independence instead of the Fourth of July. Nat Turner, as a literate man influenced by Vesey and presumably knowledgeable about the largest slave revolt in the Atlantic world, would likely have known the importance of violence, including violence against so-called innocent whites as necessary for the success of the Haitian Revolution.
Of course this is morally questionable territory Nat Turner put himself in when he and his followers murdered white women and children. One would assume his Christian preacher background would have deterred violence taken out against children, but remember that the slaveholders also called themselves “Christians” yet held people in bondage. If one focuses on what may be considered moral hypocrisy in the case of Nat Turner and other violent slave rebellions, why not focus on the even larger moral and political hypocrisy of the United States? Besides, the unarmed white women and children were still part of slaveholding families, and although the children did not choose to be members of a repugnant racist class, the murdering of women and children was easier to achieve than armed white militias, who eventually did defeat our heroes Nat Turner and company. And perhaps Fanon had it right; violence as a means of raising consciousness and a rejection of the colonizer/oppressor is a vital step. Unfortunately, the majority of enslaved African-Americans did not rise up in violent revolt, but that would have been unrealistic anyway given the lack of access to weapons and the huge hurdles facing large-scale slave rebellions in the expanse of North America. Raising a revolutionary consciousness of resistance could take multiple forms, including the much easier individual flight, infanticide, work stoppages and a counterculture or resistance in religion.
Ultimately, most African-Americans view Nat Turner as a hero for his valiant effort to overthrow slavery in Southhampton, although it may have seemed as audacious and foolish as John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry. Another one of the consequences the Virginia Assembly enacted on slave populations was requiring white clergy to be present at black religious gatherings, in a vain attempt to control black Christianity. So Nat Turner was indeed a hero, despite some morally-questionable actions taken by his group. Although something like 200 blacks throughout the South were killed in the retaliation by white mobs and vigilantes, Turner pushed white America and the enslaved population toward the necessary Civil War to end slavery once and for all.
Thursday, November 3, 2011
Soft Cell and R&B Classics
The synth-pop group best known for their top hit, "Tainted Love," which is a cover of a soul song by Gloria Jones first recorded in 1965. It's quite odd to think that a British 1980s one hit wonder band one have their biggest hit be a cover of an old R&B song since their sound is so far from Motown. I am also surprised that the British pop group was listening to old R&B from the 1960s in 1981 when they covered "Tainted Love."
Here is the original Gloria Jones version of the song
Here is Soft Cell's version, which would also be famously sampled by Rihanna for her hit singe "S.O.S."
Rihanna's song
Soft Cell also covered The Supremes' "Where Did Our Love Go" less famously. "Where Did Our Love Go" is one of my favorite Supreme songs so this discovery was quite pleasant, although their cover is not nearly as entertaining.
Here is the original and a live performance
Solange, the younger sister of Beyonce, also sampled The Supremes' version of "Where Did Our Love Go?" on her second album for the song, "I Decided, Part 1." It sounds like she samples only the percussion from the Motown version, handclaps and tambourine.
Here is the original Gloria Jones version of the song
Here is Soft Cell's version, which would also be famously sampled by Rihanna for her hit singe "S.O.S."
Rihanna's song
Soft Cell also covered The Supremes' "Where Did Our Love Go" less famously. "Where Did Our Love Go" is one of my favorite Supreme songs so this discovery was quite pleasant, although their cover is not nearly as entertaining.
Here is the original and a live performance
Solange, the younger sister of Beyonce, also sampled The Supremes' version of "Where Did Our Love Go?" on her second album for the song, "I Decided, Part 1." It sounds like she samples only the percussion from the Motown version, handclaps and tambourine.
Country pop singer Marie Osmond also covered "Where Did Our Love Go?" in the 1970s. Interesting but far from essential listening
The Clarendonians, a Jamaican rocksteady/ska group, also covered the song as "Baby, Baby"
Wednesday, November 2, 2011
Toni Morrison's Sula
Toni Morrison’s Sula, though more readable than Beloved, lacks the moving plot of the latter. Nonetheless, Morrison’s former work is easier to read because it is less repetitive, although it also shares many commonalities with Beloved. For example, elements of magical realism are present in both novels, especially in regards to the Deweys in Sula who never age despite decades of time going by. Like Beloved, Sula also focuses on race and gender through the lens of black women and the unique experiences they face as black and female in a patriarchal racist society. Indeed, race and gender and black women protagonists seem to be a common thread in many of Morrison’s works, although the story of a slave who killed her baby daughter rather than have her live in slavery is far more powerful in Beloved than the story of Sula, a sexually liberated black woman in small-town Ohio who rejects social conventions. In the end, both novels are essential for fans of Toni Morrison, and should be sought by those who care about African-American literature, feminist literature, and people who simply enjoy reading interesting American fiction.
One of the strongest themes addressed by Morrison in Sula is problems within the black community. The town of Medallion, Ohio, is a mostly white city that forced the blacks into the hills on the outskirts of the city. Furthermore, whites limit the employment opportunities for blacks by only hiring them in servile positions with low wages, which forces many of the men to find work outside of the town. When a government project initiated in 1927 to build a tunnel only hires whites and white immigrants, blacks are again excluded from access to social mobility. Only in 1965, when Nel, the best friend of Sula looks back on the history of the town, can she say that some progress occurs on race. However, by 1965, most of the blacks have left the hills and rich whites have taken over, building new homes and planning a golf course, which would erase the history of the black community that existed in the city. Thus, gentrification is one of the large themes of the novel. As Nel reflects back, she says:
The black people, for all their new look, seemed awfully anxious to get to the valley, or leave town, and abandon the hills to whoever was interested. It was sad, because the Bottom had been a real place. These young ones talking about the community, but they left the hills to the poor, the old, the stubborn—and the rich white folks (Morrison 166).
Though Nel criticizes the well-to-do blacks for leaving the Bottom in the 1940s and 1950s for the “white” valley and city proper, many poor blacks were left in the valley. Now, in the 1960s, rich whites are moving in and establishing a suburb in what once was a black community. Unfortunately, Nel does look back at the black community’s past with nostalgic eyes. But there was a real sense of community in the previous decades because the black church, Greater Saint Mathew’s, and the fact that every family knew each other in the area fostered a sense of community. Parents and children interacted with other families, and despite the problems of poverty, racism, and sexism, the black community was united for the most part.
Morrison highlights the huge flaws within the black community as well. Nel’s mother, Helene, a New Orleans-raised Creole of color, is disappointed with her daughter’s flat, Negroid nose she inherited from her father. Helene also looks down on many of the darker-skinned inhabitants of Medallion, despite being a part of the community. She joins the most conservative Protestant church and initially disapproves of her daughter’s decision to befriend Sula because of her perceived lower-class origins. So problems of color prejudice are still entrenched within the community, alongside patriarchy and morally questionable approach to the mentally ill. Sula, her mother Hannah, and her grandmother, Eva, represent a feminist family tree within the male-dominated city. Eva, the matriarch, raises her children alone, but remains independent of male control or domination. She deliberately loses a leg to receive insurance money, but purchases a large home and rents out rooms for her income. Her daughter, Hannah, loses her husband to death, and becomes a nymphomaniac. Hannah, however, only sleeps with men on her terms and uses them for sexual pleasure. Indeed, she hates it when her lovers fall asleep in the house because she only wants them for sexual gratification, not for any relationship that would ultimately require them “owning” or controlling her body. Sula, the product of these two women, carries on their tradition of rejecting expected social conventions for women: marriage, children, and loss of independence the aforementioned entail. Sula, because of her elusiveness and indifference to established habits of behavior, becomes a pariah after returning to Medallion from going to college and seeing large cities such as Detroit, Philadelphia, and Chicago. Like her mother, she sleeps with men only for her own pleasure and on her own terms, and even assumes the top position while in the act of coitus as a symbol of her own autonomous sexual power. The patriarchal black community in which she lives eventually vilifies her, and attributes her lack or regard for social conventions to evil. Her community’s refusal to accept independent women who do not live solely for the purpose of marriage and procreation illustrate how exclusively male-dominated her own ethnic group and American society overall is. Her best friend, Nel, actually reproaches Sula for “acting like a man.” According to Nel, who marries and eventually raises her children alone, Sula cannot act like a man because she is a woman and colored, meaning she must choose work and domestic life (142). Thus, even the black women of the community have internalized the oppressive racism and sexism and limit their options in life, which is why Sula becomes a hated but tolerated member of the community.
Paradoxically, the black community accepts social outcasts and the mentally ill more than the white society. Sula, though accused of being evil, remains a tolerated presence in the city, along with Shadrack, the insane drunkard and WWI veteran who establishes the National Suicide Day. Tar Baby, a white alcoholic is also tolerated in the community, and jokingly referred to as Tar Baby by Eva. These social outcasts, mentally ill, and the “evil” Sula are allowed to stay in the black neighborhood whereas white mobs and individuals would have forced them out. Sula is seen as a test for moral character of the community: she is a challenge to the established order that must be overcome and triumphed over instead of murdered or forced out of town (118). However, the fact that the community is unable to overcome its patriarchal organization of power becomes a setback. The popular adoption of the bourgeois values represented by Helene Wright deters social change, thereby reinforcing female poverty and oppression. Surprisingly, black folks do show up for the funeral service of Sula, and sing gospel songs for her despite their previous hatred for her.
Furthermore, Morrison’s use of magical realism is a welcome literary technique that is highly reminiscent of her future works. Hannah’s dream of being enveloped in a red dress predicts her death by fire, and the Dewey boys who never age also demonstrate this. Another example of magical realism is the plague of robins that takeover the town after Sula returns from abroad. These obviously unrealistic portrayals of reality indicate the falsehood of binary thinking in human life. Life cannot be summarized as solely two oppositional approaches, truth and falsehood, but the nuances of life must be recognized as part of the real world. The power of surreal or “magical” events like the never-aging Dewey boys, essentially adopted by Eva and merged into one due to her inability to tell them apart, become indistinguishable by everyone else in society. Thus, society itself draws on these nuances of reality that may not exist in the real world, but become reality as social constructs. Moreover, the use of magic realism is not surprising in African-American literature due to the singular experience of black American life. Our own experiences are “magical” in themselves for the ludicrousness of slavery and racial oppression as part of the human experience. It truly is quite unbelievable that slavery and racial oppression became entrenched in human society and dictated the course of human history since race itself is a social construct based on myth of “races” and subspecies. Of course one could also point to African-American oral traditions that speak of flying Africans and supernatural phenomena to escape slavery as well.
Besides the use of magic realism, Morrison’s novel also questions the nature of mental illness and the Manichean world of good and evil. Shadrack, the insane alcoholic, eventually grows tired of his solitude and makes a conscious decision to start a spontaneous parade in the city which grows into a march that destroys the tunnel being constructed without black labor. Shadrack, though unstable since returning from World War I, leads the angry crowd in the march against one of the symbols of their racial oppression, even though it does not end well. Thus, Shadrack fully understands the causes of their collective oppression, and seeks a solution. He also grows to reject the permanency of the world despite change, contradicting his message of “always” to the teenage Sula, who he believed feared change. For Shadrack and many of the black population, who had grown accustomed to his insane one-man marches on National Suicide Day, actually join him and struggle for real change by directing their anger at the white-controlled hegemonic system. Other presumably mentally ill characters, such as Tar Baby, the alcoholic white man living among the blacks who lives on drinks and music, also illustrate the nuances of mental illness. After causing a car accident on the white side of town, the white police arrest him and throw him in jail, using the fact that he lives in the hills as proof of his madness. Is a white man who willingly lives among Negroes naturally insane? Perhaps Tar Baby is the sanest of the whites in Medallion, Ohio.
Sula is a run-to novel for any fan of Toni Morrison. Her ultimate message in the novel, self-love and assertion of one’s identity despite social constraints, is personified in the titular character. As Sula herself realizes in the novel, no lover could ever be the version of herself she sought to reach out to and touch with an ungloved hand (121). Her life of self-fulfilled goals and interests, regardless of societal expectations of women and blacks, is a message to women (and others) around the world to love thy self. Once women, such as Sula, love themselves, they no longer need to accept the role of mothers, wives, and domestics imposed on them by society, but can contemplate a life in which their legacy is not the children they produce, but their own existence. Morrison also provides a scathing critique of American society and Black America in particular, focusing on the shortcomings of the widespread adoption of certain patriarchal bourgeois values that prevent human understanding and unity.
One of the strongest themes addressed by Morrison in Sula is problems within the black community. The town of Medallion, Ohio, is a mostly white city that forced the blacks into the hills on the outskirts of the city. Furthermore, whites limit the employment opportunities for blacks by only hiring them in servile positions with low wages, which forces many of the men to find work outside of the town. When a government project initiated in 1927 to build a tunnel only hires whites and white immigrants, blacks are again excluded from access to social mobility. Only in 1965, when Nel, the best friend of Sula looks back on the history of the town, can she say that some progress occurs on race. However, by 1965, most of the blacks have left the hills and rich whites have taken over, building new homes and planning a golf course, which would erase the history of the black community that existed in the city. Thus, gentrification is one of the large themes of the novel. As Nel reflects back, she says:
The black people, for all their new look, seemed awfully anxious to get to the valley, or leave town, and abandon the hills to whoever was interested. It was sad, because the Bottom had been a real place. These young ones talking about the community, but they left the hills to the poor, the old, the stubborn—and the rich white folks (Morrison 166).
Though Nel criticizes the well-to-do blacks for leaving the Bottom in the 1940s and 1950s for the “white” valley and city proper, many poor blacks were left in the valley. Now, in the 1960s, rich whites are moving in and establishing a suburb in what once was a black community. Unfortunately, Nel does look back at the black community’s past with nostalgic eyes. But there was a real sense of community in the previous decades because the black church, Greater Saint Mathew’s, and the fact that every family knew each other in the area fostered a sense of community. Parents and children interacted with other families, and despite the problems of poverty, racism, and sexism, the black community was united for the most part.
Morrison highlights the huge flaws within the black community as well. Nel’s mother, Helene, a New Orleans-raised Creole of color, is disappointed with her daughter’s flat, Negroid nose she inherited from her father. Helene also looks down on many of the darker-skinned inhabitants of Medallion, despite being a part of the community. She joins the most conservative Protestant church and initially disapproves of her daughter’s decision to befriend Sula because of her perceived lower-class origins. So problems of color prejudice are still entrenched within the community, alongside patriarchy and morally questionable approach to the mentally ill. Sula, her mother Hannah, and her grandmother, Eva, represent a feminist family tree within the male-dominated city. Eva, the matriarch, raises her children alone, but remains independent of male control or domination. She deliberately loses a leg to receive insurance money, but purchases a large home and rents out rooms for her income. Her daughter, Hannah, loses her husband to death, and becomes a nymphomaniac. Hannah, however, only sleeps with men on her terms and uses them for sexual pleasure. Indeed, she hates it when her lovers fall asleep in the house because she only wants them for sexual gratification, not for any relationship that would ultimately require them “owning” or controlling her body. Sula, the product of these two women, carries on their tradition of rejecting expected social conventions for women: marriage, children, and loss of independence the aforementioned entail. Sula, because of her elusiveness and indifference to established habits of behavior, becomes a pariah after returning to Medallion from going to college and seeing large cities such as Detroit, Philadelphia, and Chicago. Like her mother, she sleeps with men only for her own pleasure and on her own terms, and even assumes the top position while in the act of coitus as a symbol of her own autonomous sexual power. The patriarchal black community in which she lives eventually vilifies her, and attributes her lack or regard for social conventions to evil. Her community’s refusal to accept independent women who do not live solely for the purpose of marriage and procreation illustrate how exclusively male-dominated her own ethnic group and American society overall is. Her best friend, Nel, actually reproaches Sula for “acting like a man.” According to Nel, who marries and eventually raises her children alone, Sula cannot act like a man because she is a woman and colored, meaning she must choose work and domestic life (142). Thus, even the black women of the community have internalized the oppressive racism and sexism and limit their options in life, which is why Sula becomes a hated but tolerated member of the community.
Paradoxically, the black community accepts social outcasts and the mentally ill more than the white society. Sula, though accused of being evil, remains a tolerated presence in the city, along with Shadrack, the insane drunkard and WWI veteran who establishes the National Suicide Day. Tar Baby, a white alcoholic is also tolerated in the community, and jokingly referred to as Tar Baby by Eva. These social outcasts, mentally ill, and the “evil” Sula are allowed to stay in the black neighborhood whereas white mobs and individuals would have forced them out. Sula is seen as a test for moral character of the community: she is a challenge to the established order that must be overcome and triumphed over instead of murdered or forced out of town (118). However, the fact that the community is unable to overcome its patriarchal organization of power becomes a setback. The popular adoption of the bourgeois values represented by Helene Wright deters social change, thereby reinforcing female poverty and oppression. Surprisingly, black folks do show up for the funeral service of Sula, and sing gospel songs for her despite their previous hatred for her.
Furthermore, Morrison’s use of magical realism is a welcome literary technique that is highly reminiscent of her future works. Hannah’s dream of being enveloped in a red dress predicts her death by fire, and the Dewey boys who never age also demonstrate this. Another example of magical realism is the plague of robins that takeover the town after Sula returns from abroad. These obviously unrealistic portrayals of reality indicate the falsehood of binary thinking in human life. Life cannot be summarized as solely two oppositional approaches, truth and falsehood, but the nuances of life must be recognized as part of the real world. The power of surreal or “magical” events like the never-aging Dewey boys, essentially adopted by Eva and merged into one due to her inability to tell them apart, become indistinguishable by everyone else in society. Thus, society itself draws on these nuances of reality that may not exist in the real world, but become reality as social constructs. Moreover, the use of magic realism is not surprising in African-American literature due to the singular experience of black American life. Our own experiences are “magical” in themselves for the ludicrousness of slavery and racial oppression as part of the human experience. It truly is quite unbelievable that slavery and racial oppression became entrenched in human society and dictated the course of human history since race itself is a social construct based on myth of “races” and subspecies. Of course one could also point to African-American oral traditions that speak of flying Africans and supernatural phenomena to escape slavery as well.
Besides the use of magic realism, Morrison’s novel also questions the nature of mental illness and the Manichean world of good and evil. Shadrack, the insane alcoholic, eventually grows tired of his solitude and makes a conscious decision to start a spontaneous parade in the city which grows into a march that destroys the tunnel being constructed without black labor. Shadrack, though unstable since returning from World War I, leads the angry crowd in the march against one of the symbols of their racial oppression, even though it does not end well. Thus, Shadrack fully understands the causes of their collective oppression, and seeks a solution. He also grows to reject the permanency of the world despite change, contradicting his message of “always” to the teenage Sula, who he believed feared change. For Shadrack and many of the black population, who had grown accustomed to his insane one-man marches on National Suicide Day, actually join him and struggle for real change by directing their anger at the white-controlled hegemonic system. Other presumably mentally ill characters, such as Tar Baby, the alcoholic white man living among the blacks who lives on drinks and music, also illustrate the nuances of mental illness. After causing a car accident on the white side of town, the white police arrest him and throw him in jail, using the fact that he lives in the hills as proof of his madness. Is a white man who willingly lives among Negroes naturally insane? Perhaps Tar Baby is the sanest of the whites in Medallion, Ohio.
Sula is a run-to novel for any fan of Toni Morrison. Her ultimate message in the novel, self-love and assertion of one’s identity despite social constraints, is personified in the titular character. As Sula herself realizes in the novel, no lover could ever be the version of herself she sought to reach out to and touch with an ungloved hand (121). Her life of self-fulfilled goals and interests, regardless of societal expectations of women and blacks, is a message to women (and others) around the world to love thy self. Once women, such as Sula, love themselves, they no longer need to accept the role of mothers, wives, and domestics imposed on them by society, but can contemplate a life in which their legacy is not the children they produce, but their own existence. Morrison also provides a scathing critique of American society and Black America in particular, focusing on the shortcomings of the widespread adoption of certain patriarchal bourgeois values that prevent human understanding and unity.
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