Reading Text in Context: Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon

In Search of Lost Names: Narrating the Quest for Identity and Family History in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon Dr. Ranjana Das Sarkhel Assistant Professor Dept. of Humanities Shri Shankaracharya Engineering College Bhilai, Chhattisgarh India Abstract Toni Morrison‟s Song of Solomon revives the history of those people whose names do not find a mention in any historical document. The revival of history adds a new dimension to African American Literature where slavery becomes an important theme and gives a satisfactory sense of existence to African Americans which is built through the establishment of a link between an assured sense of the past and the present. Through Milkman‟s quest in search of his ancestors, Morrison recovers forgotten stories of many lives which have been buried, forgotten and lost during the long years of slavery. This paper is a study of Morrison‟s contestation of history to rewrite the story of her people; to give names and a heartbeat to all the anonymous people called slaves. Key words: identity, ancestors, quest, history www.ijellh.com 172 In the postcolonial world, the relationship between history and literature is no longer determined by the textual practice of traditional historical methodology as we have moved on from the chronological narration of history to a focus on the cause and effect of historical events. Today, the focus has shifted particularly to texts produced by the marginalized, the voices which generally do not come within the desired range of the centre which essentially is overwhelmingly oppressive. Linda Hutcheon draws attention to what is regarded as “fictionality of history, the blurring of the past and present, and the questioning of grand historical metanarratives”(Twentieth Century Literature, 242) with reference to what she regards as the post-modern historiographic novel, which tells history in a narrative form. Hutcheon states that “…the past is not something to be escaped, avoided or controlled…the past is something with which we must come to terms and such a c involves an acknowledgement of limitation as well as power.”(Twentieth Century Literature, 251) When history becomes the basis of fiction, making itself amenable to fictionality, the author becomes aware both of limitations and of possibilities which opens up the scope for re-reading history to go beyond the mere facts of events and look into the factors and ideas which shape the discourse. Postcolonial writings are concerned more with “efforts to revise history through reformation of traditional historiography.”(Sarah Robbins, 531) On the one hand there is the resistance to the master‟s version of historical experience, and on the other there is a continuing debate contesting the history written by imperialists. As Toni Morrison says, “…while you can‟t really blame the conqueror for writing history his own way, you can certainly debate it.”(Morrison, 224) And also as Brenda K. Marshall says, the reading of history today is ….not the kind of „History‟ that lets us think we can know the past. History in the postmodern moment becomes histories and questions. It asks: Whose history gets told? In whose name? For what purpose? Postmodernism is about histories not told, retold, untold. History as it never was. Histories forgotten, hidden, invisible, considered unimportant, changed, eradicated. It‟s about the refusal to see history as linear …(Marshall, 4) Critical practice is no longer dependent on “absolute and unquestionable „facts‟ or „truth‟ of history”(Marshall, 147) but on “ „histories‟ instead of History.”(Marshall, 147) History is open to being contested as it can no longer be contained, subverted, distorted or escaped. History is no longer an objective study, for our reading of African American literature shows that many personal histories go on to make the history of the African Americans. History and www.ijellh.com 173 literature today meet on a common ground merging the creative and the critical where inequities in the modes of representations are contested. The need for African Americans to contest history was strongly advocated by Ralph Ellison who “wanted to write about American Negro experience”(Shadow and Act,16) with the difference lying “in the perspective from which it was viewed”(Shadow and Act, 16) for the “history of the American Negro is a most intimate part of American history.”(Shadow and Act, 172) The postcolonial perspective makes it imperative that one looks anew at the relationship between the history of slavery and African American literature. The historical experience of slavery goes through certain distinct stages. In the first stage the African men, women and children were uprooted from their homeland, captured and forcibly put into the slave ships. The captors from across the seas, sometimes also with collaboration from among the African themselves, forced these people and took them into the holds of the ships as mere subhuman chattel to what is generally referred to as the Middle Passage, the second stage resulting out of the first. The confusion and negation of identities is the distinctive feature of the suffering entailed in this stage. Those who survived the Middle Passage were soon auctioned after reaching the American mainland and forced to work in the Southern plantations. The experience in the plantations was of a mixed nature. A few were lucky when their masters turned out to be kind people with some sympathetic consideration for the Blacks. It has been pointed out that in many cases, slaves, even when they were freed, went back to their white masters as they did not know where to go. However, the spiritual degradation became worse when the slaves had to work under an overseer who was himself Black, and who to meet the demands of the master had to be unusually harsh on the less fortunate ones. Psychologically, equally if not more painful, was the continued experience of displacement, both geographical and cultural. The considerable smattering of the ability to use language available to a very small number of the slaves gave rise to what can be only indeterminate traces of self-expression by the slaves, which today is referred to as the African American Slave Literature. The twentieth century African American writers had a greater freedom in matters of literary expression. They took upon themselves the task of imaginatively “reconstructing slavery as one would understand how its history continues to shape one‟s present.” (Studies in African Fiction, 81) It has become necessary for the African American to remake his past in order to make his future. It is the impact of a deep cultural memory of keeping the past alive in order to construct a better future. A more scientific study of African institutions and early cultural www.ijellh.com 174 history gave them the confidence of looking at themselves with dignity. According to Arnold Rampersad, “..Exploring the reality of slavery is necessarily painful for a Black American but only by doing so can he or she begin to understand himself or herself and American and Afro-American culture in general.”(Slavery and the Literary Imagination,123) Toni Morrison‟s achievement has been unique – a sharecropper‟s grand-daughter growing up during the Depression, receives education and goes on to write about her people and wins the Nobel Prize. More than an American education, it is her culture at home, the storytelling tradition that influenced her writings. Morrison‟s knowledge of the past, the history shared by her people, her own share of individual memory from the collective memory of the past forms the source which determines the tenor and the vehicle of her writings. A reading of Toni Morrison‟s works brings experiences of African Americans so close that even after three hundred years the institution of slavery and its impact on other aspects of black life can be read again. And it is in this re-reading of the past that one finds Morrison contesting history. When she began writing in the 1960s, equipped with her knowledge of the language, she could overcome the limitations faced by antebellum writers. Slavery was by then a national as well as personal trauma. While the white world wanted to forget it, writers like Morrison felt the need to depict slavery not as how it was but what it “truly felt” (Contemporary Literary Criticism, 226).According to Morrison, “There‟s a great deal of obfuscation and distortion and erasure, so that the presence and the heartbeat of black people has been systematically annihilated in many ways and the job of recovery is our‟s.” (Conversations with Toni Morrison, 224) Morrison‟s works can be seen as a reclamation of the history of African Americans. Toni Morrison uses history as a tool to yield political power and brings out the untold stories of suffering and survival in her novels. Her effort is to present what it must have felt like to be a slave and undergo the horrors of the institution. She uses the historical memory of a collective past and individual recollection of memory. The revival of history not only adds a new dimension to African American Literature where slavery becomes an important theme and gives a satisfactory sense of existence to African Americans which is built through the establishment of a link between an assured sense of the past and the present. Song of Solomon (1977) is the story of Milkman‟s search for his family‟s history which leads him to the realisation of his rich ancestral heritage. Song of Solomon revives the history of those people whose names do not find a mention in any historical document and of the places where they lived which cannot be found www.ijellh.com 175 on any roadmap. It is the story of “many dead lives and fading memories…buried in and beneath the names of the places in this country.

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