WATER, PERFECT MEMORY: GENDER, CULTURE AND CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE NOVELS OF TONI MORRISON By TIFFANY NOELLE HINTON A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2005 Copyright 2005 by Tiffany Noelle Hinton This document is dedicated to my mothers and fathers. I am because we are. Ase. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I thank my sweeter girl, Raiyah Parker-Rhodes Chew Shaw, for having shared mommy with this most needy sibling. I could not have made it without the girlfriends who got me ‘ovah’: especially Natalie King-Pedroso and Annette Singleton, my fellow single parents who provided family-away-from-home for my daughter and I; Kim Dismont Robinson, who will always have first dibs on my private island; and Natalie Marshall, for a lifetime of friendship. Finally, I am eternally grateful to the Florida Education Fund for funding my doctoral studies and more than a few would-be crises. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iv ABSTRACT vi CHAPTER 1 ON WATER AND BLACK METACULTURAL EXPRESSION 1 2 “SHALL WE GATHER AT THE RIVER?”: AWAKENING (IN) SULA 42 3 REBIRTH OF THE COOL IN THE BLUEST EYE AND SONG OF SOLOMON 102 4 BETWEEN CULTURAL CONSERVATION AND HISTORICAL INNOVATION: THE RITUAL PROCESS OF OSUN IN TAR BABY 124 5 “THE UNDERWATER FACE SHE NEEDED”: ‘CLEARING RITES IN BELOVED 156 6 “THE SECRET OF BEING ALIVE [THAT] SETTLES AT THE BOTTOM [OF THE WATER]” IN JAZZ 246 7 WATER, GARDENS, AND ‘ENDLESS WORK’ IN PARADISE 285 8 TO THE “GETTING PLACE” 335 LIST OF REFERENCES 342 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 349 v Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy WATER, PERFECT MEMORY: GENDER, CULTURE AND CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE NOVELS OF TONI MORRISON By Tiffany Noelle Hinton December 2005 Chair: Debra Walker King Major Department: English This study takes a comparative cultural studies approach to the curious amalgamation of water figurations in Toni Morrison’s fictions. It combines a Black metacultural framework, in which Black cultural modes and practices are examined with the context of traditional African systemics, with recent discourses on the African diaspora. Water is primary among the discrete structures of signification and modes of figuration by which, I argue, a complex of such culturally- and gender-specific concepts are carried into symbolic action in the novels. The central claim of this study is that Morrison’s water figurations serve as the central metaphor and organizing principle for the social bonds and rituals, ways of knowing and philosophical underpinnings that distinguish what I describe as a Black metacultural systemic that distinguishes the ancestral presence of the water goddess, Osun, at its center. The author’s graphic water figurations are replete with the iconography by which the Yoruba-derived riverain deity is known throughout the African Diaspora. Osun serves as figure for the self-formative vi capacities of consciousness as well as the communicable, potentially communal, process of revitalizing such internal resources. This, I argue, is precisely the role the enigmatic water goddess assumes in Morrison’s novels. Through the water figurations that announce and accompany her introspective presence in the novels, Osun functions as mediating agent for those gendered metacultural strategies by which early generations of African Americans not only survived slavery and an enduring legacy of racial tyranny but also instituted and maintained crucial measures of insight, order, and agency. My purpose in bringing the oral literature, iconography, and ritual dramaturgy of Osun to bear on the discrete structures of each Morrison novel is to demonstrate the novels’ productive relationship to a discourse of knowledge that is paramount in the cultural praxes of women and men throughout the African Diaspora. vii CHAPTER 1 ON WATER AND BLACK METACULTURAL EXPRESSION [T]he act of imagination is bound up with memory. You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. 'Floods' is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.… [L]ike water, I remember where I was before I was ‘straightened out. ─Toni Morrison, “The Site of Memory” The novels of Toni Morrison are rife with a telling aggregation of water figurations, the measured repetition of which constitutes one long and loaded question. What does it mean, for example, that The Bluest Eye’s most devastated character, Pecola, is said to be completely surrounded by “inanimate things” which she “saw,” “experienced,” and “knew” as “real,” as “the touchstones of the world, capable of translation and possession” (41)? Meanwhile, Claudia, the narrator who revels in all things liquid, not only overcomes the destitution by which Pecola is driven mad but, as Morrison has said, she will grow to become Sula (Stepto 20). Why does Morrison, writing in the essay “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature,” describe the enigmatic character of Sula in terms similar to those with which she explains the “cultural distinction” of African American literature? Whereas she attributes a literature’s ‘Blackness’ to “its language─its unpoliced, seditious, confrontational, manipulative, inventive, disruptive, masked and unmasking language,” Sula is said to be both “quintessentially black, metaphysically black” and “new world black and new world woman…. Improvisational. 1 2 Daring, disruptive, imaginative, modern, out of the house, outlawed, unpolicing, uncontained and uncontainable. And dangerously female” (11; 25). Do these designations suggest how it is that the title character of Morrison’s second novel peacefully surrenders to “a sleep of water always” only to persist long after her death as a vital, efficacious presence in the narrative action (149)? Perhaps this aggregation of trait and symbol makes Sula an auto-referential precedent for both the “water-lady” who steers Son toward the island where he reclaims his legacy in Tar Baby and the “fully dressed woman [who] walked out of the water” in Beloved (50)? This ‘water character’ and concomitant water figurations are repeated in each Morrison novel. What do they mean? I contend that these provocative structures function in Morrison’s novels as a profound “site of memory,” as metaphorical markers of distinct cultural memories, which are further informed by gender, which extend to the African cultural origins of Black America (Morrison “The Site of Memory”). My aim is to examine Morrison’s curious amalgamation of water figurations as primary among the discrete structures of signification and modes of figuration by which, I argue, a complex of such culturally- and gender-specific concepts are carried into symbolic action in the novels. As Morrison paves her narratives with temporal markers of the economic, political and social realities of the American experience, the ground of each tale is the lived- context of Black culture, as nuanced by the particular experiences of African American women. These texts do not merely reference elements of a Black, female tradition; rather it is through this distinctive frame that they pose questions of existence. In approaching the world from the particular cultural situation of Black American women, Morrison’s 3 novels implicitly recognize Black women as fundamental sources of cultural knowledge, values, and agency. As the institutionalization of African American literature in traditional English departments has been concomitant with the growth of Black women’s literature, this literature presents an implicit challenge to its critical audience. That is, literature such as Morrison’s implicitly begs “the deadly political questions” of the ways in which “cultural politics and questions of culture, of discourse, and of metaphor” inform both the creation and the critical reception of such literature (Hall 290). Morrison novels call attention to “information discredited by the West─discredited not because it is not true or useful or even of some racial value, but because it is information held by discredited people, information dismissed as ‘lore’ or ‘gossip’ or ‘magic’ or ‘sentiment’ (Morrison, “Memory, Creation, and Writing” 388). Writing in “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature,” Morrison argues compellingly for a theory of literature that truly accommodates” the presence of African American literature in the American canon; “one that is based on its culture, its history, and the artistic strategies the works employ to negotiate the world it inhabits” (11). Registering her distrust of the “sudden (for our purposes...)” scientific agreement that race, as a biological category, does not exist, Morrison says “But there is culture and both gender and ‘race’ inform and are informed by it” (3). I suggest that looking beyond national boundaries to bring a broad African- centered cultural context to bear on Morrison’s novels allows for a refined analysis of the provocative techniques by which the author represents African American cultural dynamics, as nuanced by the particular experiences of African American women. To do so is not to deny Morrison’s place within the American literary canon; rather, it is to 4 enrich our understanding of the ways in which the author’s gendered Black cultural heritage serves to inform the peculiar rhetorical, thematic, and structural characteristics of her narratives, and thus, the American literary canon. Karla F. C. Holloway, Carole Boyce Davies and Patricia Hill Collins are critical trailblazers in this regard. Holloway’s Moorings and Metaphors (1993) is a cross-cultural study of the linguistic structures by which analogous figures of Black culture and gender are inscribed in the literature of African and African American women.