On Questions of Travel: Toni Morrison’s Jazz, Sula and Tar Baby
Dr. Hanan Mahmoud Abdullatif * E.mail: [email protected]
* Dep. of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Arts, University of Bahrain and University of Nizwa On Questions of Travel: Toni Morrison’s Jazz ... Dr. Hanan Mahmoud Abdullatif
On Questions of Travel: Toni Morrison’s Jazz, Sula and Tar Baby
Dr. Hanan Mahmoud Abdullatif
Abstrat: This article discusses themes of travel present in three of Morrison’s narratives, namely, Jazz, Sula and Tar Baby. In these novels, travel is posited as a displacing factor since physical moves significantly comprise a form of psychological dislocation which betides the experience of the traveler. Characteristic to these novels is the traveler’s anxiety of failing to adapt to the new place and the fear of losing their homeland forever. Morrison’s present novels draw on the psychological displacement effected by the physical move and epitomized by the traveler’s endeavor to fit in a new place. To overcome effects of the emotional displacement engendered by the physical move, these three novels suggest that migrants acknowledge candidly their respective origins and the valuable communal traditions related to one’s home. However, Morrison warns against the danger of the nostalgia that befalls the traveler who lives in constant and obsessive recollection of the old home and their past in it. Jazz brings up the example of Joe Trace as a reminder of how obsessive recollection of the past is likely to predispose migrants to conditions of melancholia. In Sula, Morrison simultaneously emphasizes the importance of traditions and warns us against the adoption of a ghetto mentality which confines people to one place. In Tar Baby, the narrative explores the displacement of Jadine who, by reason of her travels in Europe, has entirely separated herself from the values and traditions of the African-American community. Jadine is dislocated because she can not consider herself European, neither can she perceive her own people as integral part of herself. Embedded in the novels is the stress on communal traditions and home values as instrumental in resisting the emotional displacement accompanying the experience of travel.
Key Words: Morrison’s, Jazz, Sula,Tar Baby, nostalgia, traveler, the narrative, traditions, African-American community, home values, experience of travel.
363 Issue No. 27 - Summer 2016
عن قضايا السفر في روايات توني موريسن‘‘اجلاز’’ ‘‘سوال’’ و‘‘تار بايبي’’
د. حنان حممود عبد اللطيف
الـمـلخ�ص: يناق�ش هذا املقال مو�ضوعة ال�سفر يف �أعمال توين موري�سن ال�سردية الثالثة: “اجلاز” “�سوال”، و“تار بايبي”. ففي هذه الروايات، يتم االنطالق من مو�ضوعة ال�سفر باعتبارها عامل �إزاحة، وذلك الأن ال�سفر انتقال منطو على انزياح نف�سي ت�شي بالكثري فيما يتعلق بتجربة امل�سافر. وتت�سم هذه الروايات بقلق ملحوظ لدى امل�سافر من أن� يخفق يف الت�أقلم مع املكان اجلديد وبخوفه من �أن يفقد موطنه االأ�صلي �إلى االأبد. وتعتمد هذه الروايات على تقدمي االنزياح النف�سي الذي يحدثه التنقل من مكان �إلى �آخر والذي يتمثل يف �سعي امل�سافر �إلى �أن يتواءم مع املكان اجلديد. ومن �أجل التغلب على االنزياح الوجداين النا�شئ عن التنقل، توحي هذه الروايات ب�أن على املهاجر �أن ال يتنكر �أبدا الأ�صوله �أو تقاليد وطنه. غري �أن موري�سن حتذر من خطورة احلنني الذي ي�صيب املهاجر الذي يعي�ش حالة دائمة من الهو�س مبوطنه االأ�صلي وبذكرياته عنه.
م�صطلحات �أ�سا�سية: توين موري�سن, ال�سردية, اجلاز, �سوال، تار بايبي, ال�سفر, االنزياح النف�سي, االنزياح الوجداين, املهاجر, احلنني, املوطن االأ�صلي، الذاكرة.
364 On Questions of Travel: Toni Morrison’s Jazz ... Dr. Hanan Mahmoud Abdullatif
On Questions of Travel: Toni novels are particularly significant Morrison’s Jazz, Sula and Tar Baby for emphasizing the importance of migration in producing sites Think of the long trip home. for post-colonial resistance. The Should we have stayed at home and migration themes present in the three thought of here? narratives are also a commentary on Where should we be today? identity formation and resistance to Continent, city country, society: hegemonic discourses. the choice is never wide and never In Jazz, the narrative foregrounds free. the search of the post-colonial And here, or there ... No. Should subject for empowering historical we have stayed roots and longer lasting values at home, wherever that may be? against the alienating styles of big Elizabeth Bishop, Questions of cities. The quest for origins in Jazz is Travel exemplified by Joe Trace’s longing The tropes of migration present for rural living, the longing that in Toni Morrison’s novels relate follows the physical displacement to the mass migration of African- of leaving one’s place of origin Americans from the South to the for another geographical North. Especially after the Civil location. In the North, Joe Trace, War, the search for economic Violet Trace and Alice Manfred advancement and the need to escape become displaced victims; albeit racial oppression were among the their attempts to integrate into driving forces behind the move of the new place, they suffer from African-Americans to industrial being members of a minority Northern cities. This migration has group. Migration is also associated had its significance in post-colonial with psychological displacement discourse, and the uprooting of engendered by the migrants’ post-colonial populations has struggle to plant themselves in generated forms of resistance the new environment and by their especially against the tangible fear of having forever lost their racism of big cities. The following homeland. Especially with Joe will analyze the themes of migration Trace, psychological displacement in three of Morrison’s novels, manifests itself in his attempts to Jazz, Sula and Tar Baby. These substitute one form of behavior for
365 Issue No. 27 - Summer 2016 another, trying to shed attributes sitting on. In retrospect, Violet is of his former self as hunter in mostly disconcerted by her Rose the woods and adopt instead the Dear’s passive attitude towards her borrowed conduct of an urban vicious aggressors. Violet ponders solicitor. the event, In Jazz, migrant characters like “When they got to the Joe Trace, Violet Trace and Alice table where our mother sat Manfred are voluntary economic nursing an empty cup, they migrants. Joe and Violet’s choice took the table out to leave the rural South for an urban from under her and then, industrial North came out of the need while she sat there alone, to improve their living conditions. and all by herself In addition to their aspiration for like, cup in hand, they came economic and social advancement, back and tipped the chair the Traces’ move was motivated she sat in. She didn’t jump by the need to escape from an jump up right away, so they shook oppressive South. Importantly, it a bit and since she still the narrative depicts the disabling stayed seated- looking influence of racial violence on ahead at nobody- they just both Violet and her mother Rose tipped her out of it like the Dear. While in the South, Violet way you get the cat off the was haunted by the fear lest she seat if you don’t want to would follow the same path of her touch it or pick it up in your mother’s profound distress and arms. (98)” end up committing suicide. Rose Dear suffered separation from Soon after this incident of racial a nomadic spouse who traveled violence, Rose Dear committed around the country, pursuing the suicide by jumping down a well. cause of liberation for Southern Although the narrative doesn’t black Americans. While waiting openly maintain the connection for her husband, Rose Dear was between the two incidents, the surprised by some white assailants narrative covertly hints at the who inserted themselves into her possibility that Rose Dear’s distress home, destroyed items of furniture, was likely to have been aggravated even breaking the chair she was by the aforementioned assault.
366 On Questions of Travel: Toni Morrison’s Jazz ... Dr. Hanan Mahmoud Abdullatif
After her mother’s suicide, Violet space. The well thereby becomes is troubled by the image of a well a symbol of Violet’s psychological and the threat of being devoured by instability: while she is haunted by it. She hence struggles “against the the “pull of a narrow well” (104), pull of the well” (104), the same she still ponders over the purity of well that “sucked her sleep” (102). its narrowness. Violet’s determination never to Likewise, Violet’s sense of home have children relates to her mother’s is dual: “As she grew older, Violet suicide, to her fear lest she will do could neither stay where she was to her children what Rose Dear has nor go away” (102). In the South done to her when she “dropped Violet has suffered from feelings herself down the well and missed of dislocation and separation, that all the fun” (102). The possibility is, wherever home is she doesn’t of Violet’s repeating her mother’s experience its genuine feel since she suicide lies in the continuation of is emotionally separated from home the same conditions which brought by circumstances of oppression. In about Rose Dear’s death. Like the case of Violet, dislocation is not Rose Dear, Violet internalizes the result of the traveler’s attempt the racial violence perpetrated by to acclimate to a new place. Rather, white Southerners against blacks. dislocation happens as a result What might have pushed her of Violet’s failure to adapt to the mother to committing suicide could restraining conditions of home. Thus therefore be reason enough for Jazz conceptualizes dislocation Violet to repeat that act. Still Violet as a syndrome recurring mostly perceives the “well” antithetically at home and prior to migration. as an oppressive space and a place The narrative of Jazz embodies of warmth and privacy. The narrator the notion that migration is not asserts, “Violet never forgot Rose the only and primary condition of Dear or the place she has thrown displacement. Prior to leaving their herself into, a place so narrow, so homelands, migrants like Violet dark it was pure” (101-1). This dual and Joe Trace experienced feelings perception of the “well” consists of dislocation and displacement. 1 of Violet’s fear of dying in it or by In Jazz, displacement at home was it and her paradoxical yearning to brought about by racial oppression withdraw to its protective and hiding and economic insufficiency.
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Racism and poverty play major the city as fulfilling to its promise roles in Violet and Joe’s decision to as possible. For Joe and Violet, the migrate North. It becomes difficult city becomes an economic catalyst for the Traces to settle in the South, and Joe picks up easy jobs such as especially when they hear about the selling “Cleopatra products in the job opportunities available in the neighborhood” (128). The city as North. The narrator asserts: well was fair to Violet who has taken a job in hairdressing. Nevertheless, Their Baltimore dreams were the narrator’s sarcasm is covertly displaced by more powerful at work to expose the dual side of ones. Joe knew people the city’s promise of freedom. The living in the city and some narrator remarks, “The A&P hires a who’d been there and come colored clerk. Big-legged women home with tales to make with pink kitty tongues roll money Baltimore weep. The money into green tubes for later on. ... to be earned for doing light Nobody wants to be an emergency work- standing in front of at Harlem hospital but if the Negro a door, carrying food on a surgeon is visiting, pride cuts down tray, even cleaning strangers’ the pain . . . I like the way the city shoes- got you in a day more makes people think they can do money than any of them had what they want and run away with earned in one whole harvest. it” (7). Hence, the city has offered (106). only a restricted form of freedom. As Jocelyn Joshua Chadwick The A&P has one black clerk only, contends, the promise the city offers black women still do the manual is “paradoxical in its nature” (172). work of rolling money, and white Migrants in the city are at the mercy people boycott the emergency room of its precarious promises. The when the one black surgeon is in menial jobs allocated to African- charge. American migrants have confined Migrants might get better social them, in Revathi Krishnaswamy’s opportunities only at the price of words, to a class of “Indentured becoming victims of racial and laborers, subsisting on the margins social discrimination. Jocelyn of alien(ating) societies” (134). Joshua Chadwick comments on However, some migrants have found the manner in which Jazz exposes
368 On Questions of Travel: Toni Morrison’s Jazz ... Dr. Hanan Mahmoud Abdullatif the city’s specious generosity. She that migrants can enter the city states, “What Morrison depicts over without actually being part of it. and over is the paradoxical promise What mostly identifies the that is at once positive and negative, negative side of the city is its and therefore, metamorphic, to all latent racism. Alice Manfred, for new comers as well as veterans in example, experiences city racism the city” (172). Even veterans of the as insidious to her self-esteem. city were deceived by its tantalizing Despite the fact that she has done promises. The narrative depicts the well as a seamstress, the city for disenfranchisement and poverty of her is a segregating place, a place black migrants in the city. In Jazz, where “[w]hitemen leaned out of Morrison uncovers the exploitation motor cars with folded dollar bills of migrants as blue-collar workers. peeping from their palms. It was Once they are restricted to the where salesmen touched her and “service capacity,” migrants are only her as if she were part of the also forced to inhabit the site of goods they had condescended to the margin. The world of the city sell her; it was the tissue required therefore produces internal exiles if the management was generous consisting of the emotional and enough to let you try on a blouse physical exile created at the margin. (but not hat) in a store” (54). In this Internal exiles are illustrated in instance, the narrative explicitly bell hooks’ insight into the status comments on the “hierarchical” of black Americans in industrial differentiation of black women. In Kentucky. bell hooks asserts, the city, Alice is doubly distressed “Across those [railroad] tracks was by both gender discrimination and a world we could work in as maids, racism. Another unique example as janitors, as prostitutes as far as of the city’s racism is the murder it was in a service capacity. We of Alice Manfred’s niece, Dorcas, could enter that world but we could which goes uninvestigated by the not live there” (341). In the city, police. Joe Trace kills Dorcas when displacement consists in banishing she abandons him for a younger migrants to marginal sites. In this lover. Outraged by both Joe’s sense, displacement is a post- disloyalty and Dorcas’s audacious migration condition due to the fact act of stealing her husband, Violet
369 Issue No. 27 - Summer 2016 tries to deface Dorcas’ dead manner in which Alice perceives body with a knife. Alice Manfred city music as vile will hereafter help abstains from having the police her come to terms with Dorcas’ involved in either the killing of her death. niece or the attempted violation of Alice’s experience of city fashion her niece’s corpse because she is is even more disconcerting than the wholly convinced that in the city way she relates to city music. She black people are of little if any views fashion with inconsistency, consequence. For Alice, Joe Trace that is, without being able to decide and the corrupting atmosphere of whether she likes it or not. Without the city are equally responsible for admitting it, Alice Manfred has been the murder of her niece. As she sees enthralled by city style. The narrator it, city debauchery stems out of its exposes her dual sense of the city music and styles. Since her arrival as exemplified in the manner she in Harlem, Alice was confounded relates to its fashion: “High-heeled by the “race music” in which she shoes with the graceful straps across “swore she heard a complicated the arch, the vampy hats closed anger in... something hostile that on the head with brims framing disguised itself as flourish and the face, make up of any kind- roaring seduction. But the part she all of that was outlawed in Alice hates most is its appetite. Its longing Manfred’s house. Especially the for the bash, the slit... It faked coats slung low in the back and not happiness, faked welcome, but it buttoned... Privately Alice admired did not make her feel generous, them, the coats and the women who this juke joint, barrel hooch, tank wore them” (55). Once she views house music” (57). From that kind Dorcas’ demeanor from the angle of music, Alice has tried in vain of this paradoxical perception of to protect her niece. The narrator the city, Alice Manfred begins to states, “Alice Manfred has worked understand how it is unavoidable hard to privatize her niece, for she for Dorcas to be corrupted by the was no match to a city seeping city’s numerous temptations. music that begged and challenged Still Alice Manfred has to figure each and every day. “’Come,’ it said. out the dangerous tendency to ‘Come and do wrong’” (67). The violence city migrants like Joe
370 On Questions of Travel: Toni Morrison’s Jazz ... Dr. Hanan Mahmoud Abdullatif
Trace and his wife Violet have husband’s disloyalty has cost her. expressed. Hence she meditates, On the other hand, Alice’s company “the husband shot; the wife stabbed. has helped Violet to recognize her Nothing. Nothing her niece did or own madness and to unravel her tried could equal the violence done own identity no matter how “slow” to her” (79). Ironically, Alice and and “degenerative” the process is Violet Trace come together in an (Barnes 291). With Alice, Violet attempt to understand not only the is able to break her long-sustained puzzle of Joe’s murder of Dorcas silence, the silence that reflects on but also the drawbacks of their her inability to adapt to her new surroundings. Out of their shared environment. isolation, Alice and Violet come When she arrives in the city, across the insurmountable barriers Violet is mostly known as a of Joe’s murder of Dorcas and “snappy, determined girl and a Violet’s attack on the corpse to hard working young woman, with develop woman-bonding. Because the sharp snatch-gossip tongue she bonds with Violet, Alice will of a beautician” (23). Gradually, be able to excavate her internalized she develops unbreakable silences patriarchal oppression caused by which “[o]ver time annoy her her husband’s abandonment when husband, then puzzle him and he abandoned her for another finally depress him” (24). Violet’s woman. Through Violet’s anger and silence breaks only when she insists her attempt to attack the dead body on being admitted into Alice’s of her husband’s young mistress, company. Together with Alice, Alice is encouraged to remember Violet laughs at “that Violet,” the how at some point in her life she other raggedy Violet that sits in too has been “starving for blood” the street, steals a baby, attacks a (86). Like Violet, Alice has never corpse in the casket and gets rid of intended to direct her anger against her birds. Alice looks beyond the the husband. Rather, her “craving city’s condemnation of Violet when settled on the red liquid coursing she discovers in her a multifaceted through the other woman’s vein” Violet who is more than a just crazy (86). Violet enables Alice to and violent woman. What brings recognize the immense pain her Alice and Violet together is not
371 Issue No. 27 - Summer 2016 only their age similarity or shared for self-realization and affirmation. feelings of loss, but also factors of Their quest for cultural healing in their loneliness and isolation. the collective sheds light on the In Jazz, the narrative depicts post-colonial resistance embedded displacement as a condition in the narrative of Jazz. brought about by the absence of In an essay entitled “Cultural a strong ethnic group identity. In Hybridity in Tayeb Salih’s Mousim their quest to acquire a citified al-Hijra ila al-Shamal (Season of image, migrants tend to turn their Migration to the North)” Patricia backs on their Southern values, Geesey defines the cultural hybrid neglecting mostly the importance as the “resulting offspring” of the of the community in sustaining contact between two disparate a strong sense of individual and cultures (129). Similarly Jazz group identity. For example, the epitomizes the concept of hybridity narrator is disappointed in the as a result of the contact between citified migrants Violet’s customers two separate cultures, especially in represent, the ones who “wake up presenting Joe Trace as the offspring in the afternoon, pour gin in their of the mixture between the culture of tea”(13) and always “need their the South and that of the North. His hair done” (14). From these migrant awareness of his “mixed origins” customers, Violet could never have creates in him the debilitating fear the support that she needs, the thing of having sacrificed his former which drives her to Alice Manfred’s cultural heritage. In Geesey’s doors. As migrants, Alice and words, Joe Trace is “subject to Violet locate displacement at the the laws of cultural hybridity and heart of the city and its inclusion contamination in a post-colonial of racism, isolation and corruption. sense” (36). In mourning the loss Together Alice and Violet come to of his young mistress, Joe Trace understand their shared feelings of restricts himself within the confines loneliness and therefore help each of his apartment at Lenox. Since other to confront feelings of loss, the death of Dorcas, he takes to especially the loss of homeland. the permanent posture of sitting Alice and Violet relate to each by a window, facing the city and other through their shared struggle “crying along with the glass pane”
372 On Questions of Travel: Toni Morrison’s Jazz ... Dr. Hanan Mahmoud Abdullatif
(118). Joe Trace’s profound sadness According to Patricia Geesey, trees expressed by “crying so openly” stand as symbol of “stability and (118) is indicative of a state of rootedness” (131). The manner in melancholia brought about by which he adheres to recollections mourning the loss of the beloved. of rural spots marks the need for Nevertheless, his self-imposed self-affirmation. Joe Trace stands confinement at home should not as epitome of the displaced migrant be mistaken as acknowledgment who often treasures memories as of remorse or even repentance. His a way of warding off the fear of surname “Trace” may be symbolic losing a rooted sense of identity. to his need to cling to a trace, the Morrison’s text entirely reflects trace of his love, home and lost on the phenomenon of displacement youth. The narrator asserts, “[h]e and expatriation experienced minds her death, is so sorry about it, by Southern blacks migrating but he minded more the possibility to the North. Caren Kaplan, for of his memory failing to conjure up example, might see in Joe Trace the dearness” (28). By conjuring up an enactment of the “exile” images of lost objects, Joe Trace has who is both “melancholic and been able to survive feelings of loss. nostalgic about an irreparable loss Dorcas for him is like the memory and separation from the familiar of the rural scenes he has clung to in or beloved” (30). According order to survive his alienation in the to Kaplan, “manifestations of city. At some point, Joe Trace even nostalgia participate in Europe- conflates the memory of Dorcas American constructions of exile: with that of the country: “But all nostalgia for the past; for home; for a I lived through, all I seen, and not ‘mother-tongue’; for the particulars one of those changes prepared me that signify the experience of the for her. For Dorcas. You would familiar once it has been lost. Such have thought I was twenty, back in nostalgia is rooted in the notion Palestine satisfying my appetites that it is ‘natural’ to be at ‘home’ for the first time under a walnut and that separation from that can tree” (129). The recurring images of never be assuaged by anything but trees signal Joe’s struggle to come return” (33). In this instance Kaplan to terms with what he left behind. is talking about the Euro-American
373 Issue No. 27 - Summer 2016 construction of modernist nostalgia. is Joe Trace’s sense of him(self) The narrative of Jazz depicts a as monolith: the murder of Dorcas form of nostalgia similar to the one has after all been engendered by his Kaplan has mentioned. According desire to assert his domination over to Richard Hardack, there is a her. Bewildered by the audacity of “familiar enough modernist trope Joe Trace’s murder of her niece, of self-alienation, of seeing oneself Alice Manfred wonders at “what among ill-fitting popular culture she called the impunity of the man [which] in Jazz is used to achieve who killed her niece just because he a more dynamic critique of the could” (73). Indeed, Joe Trace has American desire for a stable and not only given himself the right to self-containing male identity” (460). kill Dorcas but to grieve over her. Particularly with the character of The post-colonial theorist Renato Joe Trace, Jazz epitomizes tropes Rosaldo would explain Joe Trace’s of self alienation and nostalgia for despondency and his bountiful irreparable losses. His inability to weeping in terms of imperialist “achieve successful acclimation” nostalgia. As Rosaldo contends, in the new environment adds to his “Imperialist nostalgia revolves feelings of loss. 2 The narrative around a paradox: A person kills thereby reminds us that it is “the somebody and then mourns the city that develops a crooked kind of victim. In more attenuated form, mourning” (111). someone deliberately alters a form In Raymond Williams’ words of life, and then regrets that things Jazz embodies “singular narrative have not remained as they were of unsettlement, homelessness, prior to intervention (69-70). Joe solitude and impoverished Trace’s yearning for the beloved independence” (The Politics 34). he himself killed is a clear example In his voluntary seclusion, Joe of imperialist nostalgia. His tears Trace invents and clings to exile mourn a lost situation, not a missed as implements of self-containment. individual. Dorcas as symbol is Hence his solitary confinement more significant that the human is a defense mechanism against being she represents. Her death the “wasteland” atmosphere of marks the end of a symbol: the end the city. Bigger than his love for of dominion and the final loss of Dorcas or the memory of that love what used to be home with all its
374 On Questions of Travel: Toni Morrison’s Jazz ... Dr. Hanan Mahmoud Abdullatif connotations. sincere to their primeval values and The narrator of Jazz, who is also a neglecting to abide by the traditions migrant in Harlem, holds on steadily of the old home. Jazz portrays the to the memory of rural settings she/ migrants’ disavowal of their former he left behind. In referring to the ideals, especially when they attempt volatile and often unstable nature of to absorb city styles. The narrator the city, the narrator insists on using therefore regrettably observes country images, enhancing thus the “how soon country people forget. inner perception of the country’s When they fall in love with a city, malleability. The narrator states, it is forever, and it is like forever” “the city, in its own way, gets down (33). In adopting the stance of the at you. . . The city is smart at this: composed writer, the narrator of smelling good and looking raunchy . Jazz manages to separate from . . sending secret messages disguised other Harlem residents and also as public signs . . . Covering your divert the attention from her or his moans with its own (64). In this cultural uncertainties. Despite the instance the narrative depicts the apparent reluctance to admit it, the narrator’s fear that she or he as well narrator has been affected by the has been exposed to the same form cultural “contact” between North of cultural “contamination” that has and South. Hence, the narrator badly influenced the people she/he projects fears of displacement and observes from her apartment. The onto other characters, especially fear of cultural “contamination” when she or he implants in them is associated with the migrants’ dreams of “big trees . . . bigger than apprehension that they have forever those in the park” (43). lost the “purity” of origin due to Moreover, the narrator betrays the contact with other cultures. her or his implicit approval of and Notwithstanding the fact that “pure” possible complicity in the murder of origins are only mythical, some Dorcas when she openly proclaims, migrants obsess over mourning the “I always believed that girl was a loss of their past “purity.” In Jazz, pack of lies” (72). It is quite possible the narrator is apprehensive of the that the narrator and Joe Trace have possibility that migrants have lost figuratively and literally killed self- authenticity by ceasing to be Dorcas because she represents
375 Issue No. 27 - Summer 2016 the city values they both want to shit and began the long climb into eradicate.3 Central to the present the Bottom. She was dressed in a concern is Richard Hardack’s manner that was as close to a movie observation of how “each character star as anyone would ever see. A derives his or her voice from this black crepe dress splashed with narcissistically echoing narrator” pink and yellow zinnias . . . a black (463). Most probably the narrator purse . . . so small, so charming- has seen in Dorcas an epitome no one had seen anything like it of the cultural “contamination” ever before, including the mayor’s she also discerns in her/him self. wife and the music teacher, both Hence the narrator’s approval of of whom had been to Rome” (90). Dorcas’ death stands evidence of The community has arbitrarily his/her condemnation of the girl. “classified” Sula as an “outsider.” The narrator accordingly struggles In Craig Werner’s words, Sula against the threat of cultural comes back literally “clothed with “contamination” by dreaming the image of the colonialist” (76). of more stable and better rooted To Bottom people, Sula’s arrival locations. is ominous, it is associated with a Seen from a post-colonial plague of robins: “Accompanied by perspective, the threat of cultural a plague of robins, Sula came back “contamination” is related with the to Medallion” (89). For them, Sula experience of migration in general. now belongs to a different world Migration even has impacts on the and they are certainly destabilized sensibilities of the ones who stayed by her introducing that world into behind, especially when they get their lives. in contact with those who came Despite her long absence, Sula back from migrant places. In Sula, feels at home in the Bottom. Apart the community condemns Sula from her manner of clothing, there for the cultural “contamination” is no evidence in the narrative identifiable with “newcomers.” The to show that Sula is changed by very manner of Sula’s return to the her ten-year nomadic experience. Bottom abruptly separates her from Nonetheless, her own community Bottom people: “Sula stepped off can no longer feel at home with the Cincinnati Flyer into the robin her. They see further evidence of
376 On Questions of Travel: Toni Morrison’s Jazz ... Dr. Hanan Mahmoud Abdullatif
Sula’s assimilation of standards to recognize the old Sula in the of the “white” world when she new one strategically sheds light on puts her grandmother Eva in a the arbitrariness of their rejection residential home and when she of her. Implicit in the narrative is steals her friend Nel’s husband. the critique of the narrow scope of To them, Sula has exposed her the community’s judgment since own cultural “contamination”, it confines Sula to the trope of the and they misinterpret Sula’s “traveler” who is both unlike them styles as symptoms of her post- and different from what she used to travel alienation from them. be. The community of the Bottom The narrative also delves into unanimously perceives in Sula a the characters of the people of the form of metropolitan ideology they Bottom to expose their sharing of are not familiar with. attributes similar to the ones they When the community denounces condemn Sula for. For example, Sula as an alien, it remains oblivious the narrator precisely opposes the to the fact that, as a woman, Sula has naming of Sula as “pariah” for subsisted on the margin of the male- reasons of her easy styles when dominated world of the Bottom the people of the Bottom have even prior to her departure. The completely forgotten their “own community’s strong preferences easy ways” (112). The men in the for lighter skinned women doubly community are especially keen on confirms both Sula’s and Nel’s deploring Sula for the “unforgivable awareness of their marginality. The thing” (112), referring to her easy narrator remarks, “Because each habits of sleeping with white men. had discovered years before that Contradicting the community’s they were neither white nor male, claims to “purity” and their share in and that all freedom and triumph the “filthier” thing they accuse Sula was forbidden to them, they had of, the narrator comments, set about creating something else The fact that their own skin color to be” (52). Ironically, Sula is was proof that it had happened categorized an “outsider” only after in their own families was no spending ten years away from the deterrent to their bile. Nor was Bottom. The community’s failure the willingness of black men to
377 Issue No. 27 - Summer 2016 lie on the beds of white women a guilty in the eyes of the community. consideration that might lead them After Sula steals her best friend’s toward tolerance. They insisted that husband, the community’s all unions between white men and condemnation becomes final black women be rape; for a black and they righteously name her a woman to be willing was literally “roach”. Sula’s past is now called unthinkable. In that way, they into question as every body begins regarded integration with precisely to recall Eva’s version of what the same venom that white people happened on the day Sula’s mother did (113). Hannah was caught in fire. Eva Central to this concern is claims that she saw Sula watch with Claudia Tate’s observation that “the interest her mother in flames. That community in Morrison’s fiction they associate the evil in Sula with is never benign, and like all her factors of her nomadism is implied other characters, community itself in their never denouncing the ones is morally ambiguous, comprising who have stayed behind on grounds as it does a force for conformity, a of misconduct similar to that of demand for sanity, an argument for Sula’s. While they reminisce over rationality- none of which qualities how Sula watched with “interest” are desirable for either Morrison her mother Hannah burn, they or her wilderness characters” fail to remember how Eva herself (53). Rather than sharing the burnt her son Plum. Ironically, Eva community’s moral ambiguity, Sula was never named “pariah,” and chooses to openly breach the norms Hannah was not denounced for her of their double standards. “easy ways” and recurrent sexual One question is whether the intimacies with married men. community would denounce Sula Roberta Rubenstein argues that with such fervor if she had not left Sula is “the dark shadow, the Other, the Bottom. Her alienation from that undermines both white and the community is metaphorically black fantasies of female goodness, established in relation to the plague beauty and upward mobility. Her of robins which coincides with her position at the bottom of the bottom arrival at the Bottom. Sula’s illicit symbolizes the regrettable need wanderings make her especially to pronounce someone inferior in
378 On Questions of Travel: Toni Morrison’s Jazz ... Dr. Hanan Mahmoud Abdullatif order to defend a fragile sense of the traditions of the community. self-worth” (130). Categorizing Rather than relying on marital or Sula as “underground” self is the motherhood bonds to define her community’s way of asserting their as a person, Sula builds a sense of identity and strength. The further identity by the deliberate dismissal Sula drifts from the community, of these bonds as norms. When Eva the more important her presence refers to Sula’s single and motherless becomes to them. The Bottom status as improper, Sula responds, people want to set themselves “I don’t want to make somebody against whatever evil Sula else, I want to make myself” (92). represents. The narrative asserts, By subverting the patriarchal rules “Their conviction of Sula’s evil embraced by the community, Sula changed them in accountable yet becomes a threatening presence, mysterious ways. Once the source and Bottom people unanimously of their personal misfortune was agree that “she was laughing at their identified, they had leave to love God” (115). The god Sula refuses and protect one another. They to solicit is the revered patriarchal began to cherish their husbands and and traditional deity whose “magic wives, protect their children, repair ‘government’ was going to lift them their homes and in general band up, out and away from that dirt, together against the devil in their those beans, those wars” (160). midst” (117). The references in this Rather than despairing over passage to the community’s need of absences in their lives, the Bottom recognizing itself against the limits people occupy themselves with of Sula are crucial. Morrison’s obsessing over Sula’s aberration. narrative makes it clear that Sula The steadfastness of economic after all is not much different from insufficiency forms one of the the people who condemn her. major absences among the Bottom Moreover, Sula becomes worthy community. People in the Bottom of the community’s contempt per could not rely on agriculture excellence when she chooses not because the Bottom is located on to recognize the limitations of her mountainous areas where land gender. Unlike her friend Nel, she cultivation is backbreaking work. refuses to marry in accordance with The white community of Medallion
379 Issue No. 27 - Summer 2016 have literally displaced the black over the evil in Sula. McKee writes community when they ousted them of Sula, “By identifying Sula as to the hilly parts they --the white evil and rejecting her categorically, people-- paradoxically named the people in the Bottom are able to Bottom. Medallion’s white farmers keep their distance from absences managed to discharge the black they cannot afford to acknowledge” residents of the fertile soil of the (4). valley. They tricked a poor black The hopes of the Bottom people farmer to accept the hilltop land to benefit economically from the rather than the promised bottom construction of a tunnel site are land which is more suitable for shattered as it turns out that white farming. The farmer was led to workers exclusively get hired believe that hilltop land was closer for the job. When Bottom people to heaven, hence the naming of the spontaneously join Shadrack in hilly side of Medallion as Bottom celebrating his ritual of National to Heaven. The black community Suicide Day, they end up destroying inhabiting the heights of Medallion the tunnel site. The destruction of is symbolically situated at the the tunnel marks the revolt against bottom of its economic and social the economic obliteration of blacks stratum. By assigning the heights by whites. Significantly, Bottom to black people, Medallion’s white people begin to recognize their community manage to exclude economic deprivation as a major blacks from agriculture, Medallion’s absence only after Sula’s death, major source of production. This when they cease to rely on her evil as literal displacement has created a way of avoiding reality. Morrison emotional dislocation among the herself asserts, “‘I wanted Sula black community that misses real to be missed by the reader. That’s attachment to land or to any other why she dies early’” (“Spacing” substantial source of living. Patricia 4). Commenting on Morrison’s McKee contends that missing statement, McKee writes, “To miss or absent attachments means a Sula is to recognize her occupation “massive ‘displacement’” (4). in and of the Bottom: what she did Bottom people can only avoid factors there and how she was a necessary of their displacement by obsessing part of the place, not only as
380 On Questions of Travel: Toni Morrison’s Jazz ... Dr. Hanan Mahmoud Abdullatif presence but also because she took In this instance, Eva introduces the place of absence” (4). Instead Nel to a form of truth she has of dwelling over the absence of not yet discovered in herself, the economic stability, the community truth that “All these years she had of the Bottom occupied themselves been secretly proud of her calm, with inventing a Sula’s different controlled behavior when Sula was from them. Sula’s death becomes uncontrollable, her compassion for a major absence to the Bottom Sula’s frightened and shamed eyes. people, especially to her friend Now it seemed that what she had Nel, as it takes Nel a long time to thought was maturity, serenity and discover that it is Sula and not her compassion was only the tranquillity husband Jude that she misses. Nel that follows a joyful stimulation” suddenly realizes that Sula after all (170). Bemoaning Sula’s death, Nel is an integral part of herself, her own cries out, “We was girls together” significant “other”. To the Bottom, (174). This is significant: Nel has however, Sula remains the internal willfully shared Sula’s laughter at “other” whose irrationality has the town’s out-of-date traditions, given them the urge to be rational. but has hidden her laughter behind When Sula is absent, the people assumed conformity. Like the rest of the Bottom lose the wholesome of town, Nel has condemned Sula outlook Sula’s presence enabled. less for her easy habits of sleeping The massive deaths caused by the with men and more for the fear destruction of the tunnel indicates of cultural “contamination” Sula the exhaustion of the Bottom’s presented ever since she came back potential to put up with major to the Bottom. absences. What the narrative implicitly What Nel mostly misses in critiques is the community’s Sula is the latter’s subversive adoption of the modern world’s nonconformity to the absolute paradigms of “purity”. The conventions of the Bottom. Nel persistent questioning of the realizes that she and Sula are one anomalous and “discriminatory” item when Eva tells herr, “Just status ascribed to Sula is the primary alike. Both of you. Never was no underlying theme of the narrative. difference between you” (169). Sula has been assigned the position
381 Issue No. 27 - Summer 2016 of the migrant and diaspora and her neither an “outsider” to nor as impurity becomes foundational to part of the Bottom. Likewise, the the community’s perception of itself narrative offers no indication that as “pure”. While the community Sula has assimilated the values condemns Sula as the breeder of the (“white?”) world she left of alien ideologies, the narrative behind. For example, the narrative defends Sula as the positive does not depict Sula as culturally hybrid. Homi Bhabha, for example, destabilized by the long absence comments on the empowering from her homeland. In Bhabha’s effects of hybridity in that it words, Sula occupies the “in- “displays the necessary deformation between space,” that is, “the Third and displacement of all sites of space of enunciations- that carries discrimination and domination. It the burden on the meaning of unsettles the narcissistic or mimetic culture” (38). The third space the demands of colonial power [by narrative of Sula embraces is the implicating] its identifications in world that Sula herself occupies: strategies of subversion that turns a world which admits no fixed the gaze of the discriminated back positions and completely abandons upon the eye of power” (112). In monolithic choices of either/or for Sula, the narrative locates sites of the diverse orientations of both/and. discrimination and domination at the Like Morrison’s other novels, heart of the community’s embrace Sula predicates tradition as a way of authoritarian and patriarchal out of social and psychological traditions. Sula’s hybridity is seen entrapment. The narrative covertly in light of her resisting practices asserts the necessity to cast aside the against patriarchal replication and old-fashioned patriarchal traditions perpetuation of colonial hegemony. of gender oppression. The narrative Instead of passively submitting to thereby abstains from either the Bottom’s patriarchal traditions criticizing or apologizing for Sula’s and their unjust demand for women destruction of the patriarchal norms to accept marital and maternal of the Bottom. Still Sula does not roles, Sula lives in accordance with in any way invoke the modernist her own imagination. Significantly, project and its advocating of the the narrative depicts Sula as arbitrary overthrow of all forms of
382 On Questions of Travel: Toni Morrison’s Jazz ... Dr. Hanan Mahmoud Abdullatif traditions. In a sense, Sula follows have forgotten some important the line of Walter Benjamin’s communal traditions. Unlike the insistence on the indispensability migrants who leave without a of the continuous attempt to “wrest chance of ever coming back, Sula tradition away from a conformism returns to the Bottom. The narrative that is about to overpower it” therefore remains uncritical of her (681). Likewise, Sula advocates the temporary absence from the Bottom. endeavor to liberate traditions from However, the narrative critiques the smug conformism. In Sula, Morrison manner in which Bottom people calls for the preservation of certain have negatively perceived Sula’s binding traditions. For example, absence by relating a plague of she regrettably proclaims the robins to her unexpected arrival. disintegration of certain communal In Sula, Morrison abandons the traditions caused by the community’s adoption of ghetto mentality by adoption of the values of the modern refusing to confine her characters world. The narrative states, within narrowly defined cultural domains. 4 Still the narrative is not The black people, for all their negligent of the losses combined new look, seemed awfully with the experiences of travel, a anxious to get to the valley, or clear example is Eva’s return to the leave town and abandon the Bottom with a leg amputated. Nel’s hills to whoever was interested. mother has her sense of identity It was sad, because the Bottom troubled when on board the train had been a real place. These the conductor calls her “girl.” And young men kept talking about Shadrack loses his sanity when he the community, but they left travels to fight a war and participate the hills to the poor, the old, in the inhuman and unnecessary the stubborn- and the rich killing of others. white folks. (166) Like Joe Trace and unlike Sula, The narrative pinpoints the Jadine in Tar Baby predicates the actual abandonment of the Bottom negative attributes of hybridity. by its people. Those who left Travel for Jadine is a major the Bottom will probably not go destabilizing force, rendering her back, and those who stayed behind irreparably dislocated. Jadine’s
383 Issue No. 27 - Summer 2016 travel in Europe is likely to a white form of beauty is her only disconnect her from ancestral and license into wealthy society. Jadine cultural roots. While in Europe, probably knows that her career in Jadine worked as a model and she modeling is a form of compromise, obtained a degree in European art which is likely to engender in her history. The narrative pinpoints the feelings of disingenuousness and paradoxes of Jadine’s success as cultural vulnerability. For example, a European art historian and her Jadine is emotionally destabilized tremendous failure to grasp African by an African woman with a tradition and folk culture. Her yellow dress who spits at her. The education in Paris was a form of woman’s insulting gesture makes compromise since it was subsidized Jadine feel out of place in Paris. by Valerian Street, the white So she immediately takes a flight industrialist who employs her uncle out of Paris to Isle des Chevaliers, and aunt as butler and cook. a small island on the Caribbean Jadine’s cultural displacement is where Valerian Street and her aunt evident in the dilemma she faces and uncle reside. The woman’s when her European boyfriend gesture has derailing effects on her proposes to marry her. In this because Jadine fully understands its instance, she is confident that he is meaning: the woman Jadine wants the man she wants to marry; still to identify with as “sister/mother/ she is not sure if he really wants her. she” (46) has entirely rejected her Thus, she wonders if “the person he as member of the race. Jadine also wants to marry is me or a black girl? identifies the woman in the yellow And if it isn’t me he wants, but any dress as the archetypal mother black girl who looks like me, talks by virtue of “too much hip” and and acts like me, what will happen if “too much bust” (45). To Jadine, he finds out that I hate ear loops, that she is the “woman’s woman”, I don’t have to straighten my hair . the “unphotographable beauty”, . . that sometimes I want to get out the “eyes whose force has burnt of my skin and be only the person away their lashes” (46). What inside- not American- not black, Jadine wants from the woman is just me” (48). This reveals Jadine’s recognition, she “wanted that awareness that her possession of woman to like and respect her” (47).
384 On Questions of Travel: Toni Morrison’s Jazz ... Dr. Hanan Mahmoud Abdullatif
The woman instead shows only rootedness she herself lacks. The contempt and Jadine perceives the narrative comments. woman’s disregard to be directed at The young trees sighed and her own rootlesseness. The incident swayed. The women looked is especially significant since it down from the rafters of points out Jadine’s distance from the trees and stopped murmuring. her African heritage. The gesture They were delighted when which forces Jadine out of Paris they first saw her, has also destabilized her sense of thinking a runaway child had identity. been restored to them. The Her escape back to Isle des women hanging from Chevaliers is most likely motivated the trees were quiet now, but by Jadine’s search for roots, for a arrogant, mindful as they were place she might identify with home. of their own value, However, the island only reinforces their exceptional femaleness; Jadine’s alienation from her own knowing as they did that the culture. She is displaced even first world of the among the people she calls family: world had been built with their she can not relate to the Streets, who exceptional femaleness. (183) sponsored her education, neither can she be daughter to the uncle The narrator’s above comment and aunt who adopted her when she is symbolic of Jadine’s cultural was twelve years old. To the black orphanage, her inherent awareness people in the community, Jadine of it and the resulting guilt. Jadine is the daughter who estranged has sacrificed her own cultural herself from them. In their solid competency when she attempts rootedness, the trees remind Jadine to assimilate white values and of her inappropriate separation norms. To the black people of Isle from her roots. Alone in the woods, des Chevaliers, Jadine is now a she imagines the presence of complete stranger and has surely lost women hung from trees. Like the her connection with her ancestral woman she encounters in Paris, roots in the African community. the women she sees hanging from As Craig Werner might have it, trees represent the stability and Jadine’s “struggle between two
385 Issue No. 27 - Summer 2016 irreconcilable strivings threatens the Streets. He wants to help Jadine to plunge the black person trying out of her psychological entrapment to escape his or her native culture to the Streets who sponsored her into a sort of halfway house, where education, and he goes along with that person is accepted neither as Jadine’s plan to escape the Street’s part of the European world nor part homestead. of the black one” (70). Jadine has In New York, Son is disoriented obviously shunned African values by the haunting gloominess for the white world in which she he identifies with the city. The travels, the same white world that discernible despondency of the accepts her only as half-white and city is especially typical of black not as completely black. women: “Black girls in New York When Jadine attempts to reconnect City were crying and their men were with her ancestral roots through her looking neither to the right nor to romantic affair with Son, she fails. the left. . . . Oh, their mouths were The African American lover she heavy with plum lipstick and their picks on the island is metaphoric eyebrows were a thin gay line, but of the nurturing ancestor she never nothing could stop their crying and had: “She wanted a little human nothing could persuade their men to warmth, some unsullied person look to the right or look to the left” to be near, so she took his hand (214). This reflects on the apparent without thinking about it and said dichotomy between the city and the ‘that’s awful’” (210). Inherently, country side. Son, who has grown Jadine is aware of both her need up in the warmth of the country, for Son and Son’s willingness to is likely to perceive New York meet her needs. The text comments, as an alienating and melancholic “For the first time she saw his huge dwelling. As in Jazz, The narrative hands. One hand alone was big of Tar Baby overtly comments on enough for two. A finger spread that the disenfranchisement of black could reach hither for you” (211). people in big cities. For example, the The hand is another metaphor of the narrator comments on the manner type of inner strength Jadine lacks. in which the women’s sadness has Son’s immediate plan is to liberate touched Son, “It depressed him all Jadine from her subordination to that crying, for it was silent and
386 On Questions of Travel: Toni Morrison’s Jazz ... Dr. Hanan Mahmoud Abdullatif veiled by plum lipstick and thin gay role of the women in Eloe. The lines over their eyes” (216). Jadine, narrator notes, on the other hand, remains unaware “She kept barking at him about of the disconsolate people Son has equality, sexual equality, as noticed in New York. She is so though he thought women happy in New York to the extent that were inferior. He could not she wants to “giggle” (221). New understand that. Before York is surely the place where she Francine was attacked by the feels at home: “New York oiled her dogs, she gave him ten points joints and she moved as though they on the court and still beat him. . . were oiled. Her legs were longer Cheyenne [Son’s former wife] here, her neck really connected her was driving a beat up old truck body to her head” (221). Unlike at age nine, four years before Son, Jadine experiences the city as he could even shift gears, and empowering. she could drop a pheasant Son’s disappointment in New like an Indian. His mother’s York invokes his dreams of Eloe, memory was kept alive by his original small town in North those who remembered how Florida. In Eloe, Jadine’s identity she roped horses when she crisis reaches its climax. As she was a girl. (268)” sees it, Son and the rest of the black community of Eloe connect to Son’s observation here eliminates women only in terms of patriarchal the myth of independence attributed domination and control. Jadine’s to the female city dwellers against identity crisis takes the form of their supposedly less independent sexual fears and she dreams of country counterparts. No matter “night women” who were “all there what Son says, Jadine is confirmed crowding into the room. Some of in her belief that women in Eloe are them she did not know, recognize, subjects to men’s control especially but they were all there spoiling her in their acceptance of their role as love making, taking her sex like mothers and protectors. As Jadine succubi; but not his” (258). Son sees it, Eloe is still entrapped in a contradicts Jadine essentializing certain set of traditions in which rhetoric and asserts the economic men relate to women only as independence and the indispensable ultimate mothers.
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Back in New York, Jadine and awareness that she is not an Son fight each other with relentless integral part of the other world she vehemence. Jadine wants to raise covets. The certitude of Jadine’s Son from the extreme poverty she lack of cultural genuineness has identifies with Eloe and bind him prevented her from integrating into to the world of finesse she relates the world of Eloe. Evidence of her to the city. Likewise, Son tries dislocation and separation is seen to pull Jadine away from what he in her adoption of values different sees as fraudulent city styles and from those embraced by her own he ardently resists her attempts to group. Son, on the other hand, goes make him part of her world. In view back to the Isle des les Chevalier of their irreconcilable differences, searching for Jadine. Marie Terese, their romantic affair is inevitably a black ancestral figure, manages to fated. The narrator asserts, Each convince him to “forget her,” adding was pulling the other away from the that “There is nothing in her parts for maw of hell- its very ridge top. Each you. She has forgotten her ancient knew the world as it was meant or properties” (305). Son decides to ought to be (269).” stay on the island and become one Like differences in their own of its legendary knights, immersing characters, the disparities of himself further in his folk tradition their world cannot be bridged, and African roots. Contrasted with and Jadine’s flight back to Paris the narrative implicit critique of is significant enough of the Jadine’s departure to Paris is a unfeasibility of compromise. covertly sympathetic tone with In this final instance of Jadine’s Son’s decision to stay on the island. frequent travels lies the truth of The Streets continue to reside on the Jadine’s inability to recognize island, living like prisoners in their herself as a real human apart from big mansion and letting themselves travel. Only in adopting the cultural be consumed by the guilt of having standards of some metropolitan abused and neglected their only site could Jadine come to a closer son. affirmation of her own identity. Just as the narrative is explicitly Still her onetime escape from critical of cultural precariousness, Paris stands as evidence of her it also implicitly invalidates Eloe’s
388 On Questions of Travel: Toni Morrison’s Jazz ... Dr. Hanan Mahmoud Abdullatif patriarchal conventions and Son’s context. conformity to them. Like Sula, The three texts, Jazz, Sula, and Tar Baby covertly calls out for Tar Baby deal with the theme of a withdrawal from some of the migration of African-Americans traditions that overpower personal from the rural South to industrial freedom. Tar Baby and Jazz focus Northern cities and the coexisting on the negative aspects of the movement to metropoplitan experience of hybridity. The three sites. In the context of Morrison’s narratives advocate traditions narratives, migration is significant as empowering tools against the since it brings up themes of alienating forces of expatriation. emotional displacement brought But the texts also emphasize the about by the physical move from importance of shedding some one geographical location to the traditions of the patriarchal control other. The migrant is displaced by of men over women. Jazz invites the attempt to acclimate to the new the formation of ethnic group place and by his/her awareness identity, while it cautions against of factors of racism identifying blind absorption of city norms on metropolitan locations. The three the part of southern migrants. Sula narratives provide migrant people advocates hybridity, especially with tools of resistance consisting when the hybrid resists assimilating of communal bonding among the values of restrictive mother migrants and adherence to one’s communities. While Sula insists cultural values and traditions. In on the importance of communal the three narratives, Morrison also bonding, it is critical of the insists on casting out old-fashioned community’s attempt to police traditions which overpower freedom Sula’s personal liberty. Morrison’s and bring about gender oppression. Jazz, Sula and Tar Baby include an analysis of how travel affects identity formation. The three texts call for resistance against assimilation in a post-colonial
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Notes 1 I use the two nouns interchangeably and both usages should convey the same meaning, that is, one’s incapacity to experience feelings of belonging to one’s own home, especially when home offers no more than conditions of oppression and economic insufficiency. 2 Caren Kaplan uses Elsa Triolet’s argument that human beings are like plants and animals and that certain species cannot achieve successful acclimation, Questions of Travel, p. 33. 3 This echoes Evalyn Accad’s comment on Sa’eed’s killing of the English woman he marries because she represents Western values that he wants to eradicate. Accad is quoted in Patricia Geesey’s “cultural hybridity in Tayeb Salih’s Mousim al-Hijra ila al-Shamal,” p. 134. 4 Salman Rushdie warns against the adoption of ghetto mentality. In Imaginary Homelands, he reminds us not “to forget that there is a world beyond the community to which we belong, to confine ourselves within narrowly defined cultural frontiers, would be, I believe, to go involuntarily into that form of internal exile which in South Africa is called the ‘homeland,’” p. 19.
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Discourse of Colonialism.” In Theory: Marginalization and contemporary Culture. Ed. Russell Fergusson, et al. New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1990. Chadwick, Jocelyn Joshua. “Metonymy and Synecdoche.” The City in African- American Literature. Eds. Yoshinobu Hakutani and Robert Butler. London: Associated University Press, 1995. Geesey, Patricia. “Cultural Hybridity in Tayeb Salih’s Mousim al-Hijra ila al-Shamal (Season of Migration to the North).” Research In African- American Literature: Arabic Writing in Africa 28.3 (1997): 128-140. Hardack, Richard. “‘A Music Seeking its Own words’”: Double Timing and Double Consciousness in Toni Morrison’s Jazz.” Callalo 18.1 (1995): 451-470. Kaplan, Caren. Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourse of Displacement. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996. Krishnaswamy, Revathi. “Mythologies of Migrancy: Post-colonialism, Postmodernism and the Politics of (Dis)closure.” Ariel 26.1 (1995):125-146. America. Ed. William G. Dotty. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1995. McKee, Patricia. “Spacing and Placing Experience in Morrison’s Sula.” Modern Fiction Studies 42.1 (1996): 1-23. Morrison, Toni. Jazz. New York: Plume, 1993. ---. Tar Baby. New York: Plume, 1983. ---. Sula. New York: Plume, 1973. Rosaldo, Renato. “Imperialist Nostalgia.” Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis. Beacon Press, 1989. Rubenstein, Roberta. “Pariah and Community.” Critical Perspectives Past and Present Eds. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. and K. A. Appiah. New York: Amistad Press, 1993. Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991. London: Granta Books, 1991. Said, Edward. “Identity, Authority and Freedom: The Potentate and the Traveller.” Source 1.2 (1991): 67-81.
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Tate, Claudia. “Black Women Writers at Work.” Domestic Allegories of Political Desire: The Black Heroine’s Text at the Turn of the Century. Oxford: Oxford U n i v e r s i t y Press: 1992. Werner, Craig. “New Democratic Vistas: Toward a Pluralistic Genealogy.” Joseph Weixlmann and Chester J. Fontenot. Eds. Studies in Black American Literature II: Belief Vs. Theory. Greenwood, Fla.: Penkeville, 1986. Williams, Raymond. The Politics of Modernism. Ed. Toni Pinkney. London: Verso, 1989.
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