Haven Imagined & Paradise
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• ISSUE NUMBffi THRE & FOUR • 1988 • Solomon) and Baby Suggs - Sethe - Denver/ Haven Beloved in (Beloved) is inventively and radi- cally deployed in Paradise such that Morrison moves beyond given biological associations to Imagined speak about affiliative connections between and among women of different generations and colour. It must be noted that affiliation, in the & Paradise Saidian sense, is stronger and thicker than the proverbial blood of filiation. Thus, the various Aderemi Raji-Oyelade shades of loves shared between and among such Lost female characters of Paradise as Lone Dupres - Consolata - Mary Magna, Mary Magna - Toni Morrison. PARADISE, Alfred Consolata, Consolata - Soane Morgan - Mavis - Gigi - Arnette... are more developed and sus- A Knopf. New Yorfe, 1998, 318pp. tained. Regarded as the final part of Morrison's nov- They don't need men and they elistic trilogy on love coming after Beloved don't need God... everybody who (1987) and Jazz (1991), Paradise is about sis- goes near them is maimed terhood, motherhood and the overaching somehow and the mess is memorisation of the cultural institution of sla- seeping back into our homes, very coupled with its histories of migration and our families. We can't have re-settlement. It is about women on the run, it, you all. Can't have it at all. (276) from men (and sometimes other women) in their cruel, conspiratorial, vindictive and vio- lent poses; it is also about the history of terri- HE statement here produced as epi- torial claims and the theory of racial separat- graph is a declarative utterance ism. The girls and women whose lives are nar- which signifies the primary project rated in bits include Mavis Albright who lost of conflict of identities and power re- her set of twins in an accident of forgetfulness Tlations metaphorically and masterfully and consequently felt paranoid or convinced enuciated in Toni Morrison's seventh and most that her other children encouraged by Frank recent novel to date, Paradise. That statement (her husband) are all out to kill her; there is made by a man of God, Reverend Cary at the Arnette Fleetwood, a daughter of one of the peak of depression and animosity in the seedy, original nine families in Ruby, too young when fictional town of Ruby is indeed a testament of she got impregnated by K.D., there is Billie the community's deep-seated rejection of the Delia who almost got killed by her own mother, development and influence of a convent of Patricia Best; there is Pallas who ran away women separated from and independent of the from home to the Convent to have her baby; rigid and patriarchal structures of the main and Gigi (Grace), and Seneca, and Connie community. In very significant ways, Paradise (Consolata) who has always been Mother is an extended and inventive narrative repre- Superior's (Mary Magna) companion since the sentation of Morrison's idea of cultural iden- age of the nine. The moving spirit of the con- tity, history and memory; in this novel, the win- vent is Sister Mary Magna, an old fairy-like ner of the 1993 Nobel Prize for Literature has woman, once a devoted American nun who "kid- succeeded in telling old, familiar stories with napped' or rescued three coloured children in jolting metaphors and refreshing panache. The 1925 from desolation and death on a South characteristic Morrisonian text has a plural American street, left two of them in a Puerto voiced narrator, reminiscent of oral storytelling Limon orphanage and retained the third one - pattern, with a multi-layered network of indi- Consolata - having developed a strong affec- vidual tales which coalesce into a grand nar- tion for the child. She travelled with the girl to rative of community, communalism and, sex- her new posting - an asylum/boarding school ist and racial explorations. for Indian girls. Located in a remote part of As an extended, yet organic, work, Para- North American West and known as CHRIST dise reads like an intertextual consummation THE KING SCHOOL FOR NATIVE GIRLS, of an authorised project of envisioning a fe- the institution soon lost its original function of male-centered world free from, impervious to making Catholics out of natives and it trans- or subsistent in spite of male hegemonic struc- formed into a Convent, a receptacle of Isroken tures. The idea of (a) potent female girls, frightened girls, weak and lying'. (222) relationship(s) noticeable and which links such characters in filial bonding as Eva-Hannah- For women on the run or in tears, the Con- Sula (in Sula), Pilate-Reba-Hagar (in Song of vent is a house of succour, fellowship and tran- quility where sorrows are shared and laugh- Glendora Biokt Supplement 13 ISSUE NUMBER THRE ft FOUR • 1998 • I ters disseminated and spread in the sun; when loved ones. Gigi converses with Daddy Man, 'the wind handled (them) like a man', the Con- Pallas appears before Dee Dee, Mavis shares a vent is Paradise for 'crying women, staring meal with Sally in a restaurant, and Seneca women, scowling, lip-biting women or women engages Jean in a talk about identity. just plain lost' (270). To the men of Ruby in- In spite of the romantic verbalisation of the cluding the Morgan twins (Deacon and Stew- significant lives of the Convent women, the ard), Arnold and Jeff Fleetwood, Harper, Ser- house of dream of paradise is shattered and geant Person and Reverend Cary, the Convent abandoned. But the lesson of its destruction is is an eerie school for witches, a coven of delu- contained in Reverend Misner's query of the sions where forms of perversions including sor- Ruby onslaught ('How can they hold it to- cery, infanticide, alco- gether... this hard-won heaven defined only by holism, abortion and les- the absence of the unsaved...?) (306); the val- bianism are practiced. ues and the possibility of its possibility reside In the male imagina- in Billie Delia's question - When will they re- tion, the place is seen as appear, with blazing eyes... to rip up and stomp 'dark and malevolently down this prison calling itself a town?' (308) disconnected from God's and in Deacon Morgan's act of contrition for earth'(18). being an accomplice to the siege on the Con- The New Fathers of vent. Above all, Toni Morrison has presented Ruby, Oklahoma, in the inherent aspiration for peace, love and com- their 'odour of righteous- fort in the female psyche within what Francoise ness' are broadly por- Lionnet has called a 'deep-seated cultural mi- trayed as misogynists sogyny and the potentially fatal consequences for in the words of of practices... Which construct women as ob- Patricia Best, 'every- jects of exchange' (Postcolonial Representations, thing that worries them 1995), (104). must come from women' Generally, the narrative pattern of Para- (217); reports of several dise is neither spiral nor locomotive as we find outrages, from the comi- in Morrison's earlier novels; its pace is some- cal to the tragic, in Ruby times jazzy, breezy or poetic, sometimes florid are attributed to the and certainly chess-like that its original out- presence of the Convent lay may be qualified as cryptic and unusual; women. The misogynic vignettes of tales are retold across sections/ tendency of Sargeant, chapters/movements (named after female char- for instance, is driven by acters) in such a manner that there are inter- a materialistic force to vening echoes of one experiential subject in the possess the inscrutably fertile Convent land, other. The setting of the novel temporally spans while Menus thinks that eighty-seven years - (1890-1976) i.e. between the only sure way of re- Reconstruction period and post world wars and gaining his manhood or Black Power eras; spatially, stories revolve relevance is by unleash- around the settlers of a place called New Ha- ing violence on the women. Perhaps, this mi- ven later named after Ruby a woman who died Toni Morrison during the re-settlement of freed slaves. But Photograph by Kate Kunz sogynist figuration is so deployed in order re- assert the feminist discourse of shocking men more so, the virtual site of representation of out of a lethargy towards complementary gen- women's lives is the Convent, a couple of miles der relations. Yet the act of hateful suppres- on the outskirts of Ruby. The metaphor of the sion of (the) female personae/association, bra- road which links the two sites, and the meta- zenly displayed by the gang of nine is a subtle phor of the castle which refers to the Convent recognition, by men, of the latent powers of and its supernatural halo are necessary for a female fraternity - 'I know they got powers. determinate reproduction of meaning in the Question is whose power is stronger. Why don't novel. In Bakhtinian terms, these are called they just get on out, leave?' (275-6) In that fa- chronotopes which serve as time-markers, and tal siege on the Convent, Consolata is killed tropes of actions. The castle - Convent, for in- while the fate of the other occupants floats stance, is the point where palpable voices or between escape, massacre and disappearance figures or legends like the Circe-like Mother depending on which version of that encounter Superior are domestically contained ('the house is being retold. Thus, the Convent becomes fur- was like a castle, full of a beauty...') (225); the ther highlighted when in the last movement other chronotope, that is, of parlors and salons, (strategically, untitled) of the novel, the women where webs of conspiracy are generated, relates appear, with angelic brevity, to each of their directly to the Oven, the meeting point of the community where group exhortation against Glendera Bosks Supplement 14 ISSUE NUMBER THRE & FOUR • 1998 the Convent takes place.