Geography and the Political Imaginary in the Novels of Toni Morrison

Herman Beavers

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783319659992
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book examines Toni Morrison's fiction as a sustained effort to challenge thedominant narratives produced in the white supremacist political imaginary and conceptualize a more inclusive political imaginary in which black bodies are valued. Herman Beavers closely examines politics of scale and contentious politics in order to discern Morrison's larger intent of revealing the deep structure of power relations in black communities that will enable them to fashion counterhegemonic projects. The volume explores how Morrison stages her ruminations on the political imaginary in neighborhoods or small towns; rooms, houses or streets. Beavers argues that these spatial and domestic geographies are sites where the management of traumatic injury is integral to establishing a sense of place, proposing these "tight spaces" as sites where narratives are produced and contested; sites of inscription and erasure, utterance and silence.

© The Author(s) 2018

Herman BeaversGeography and the Political Imaginary in the Novels of Toni MorrisonGeocriticism and Spatial Literary Studieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65999-2_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Herman Beavers¹

(1)

Department of English, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA

Herman Beavers

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Early in Toni Morrison’s Paradise , one of the Fleetwood twins takes a moment to reflect upon life in the all-black town of Ruby and how its inhabitants feel “free and protected.” ¹ He thinks about how a

sleeping woman could always rise from her bed, wrap her shawl around her shoulders and sit on the steps in the moonlight. And if she felt like it she could walk out the yard and on down the road. No lamp and no fear. A hiss-crackle from the side of the road would never scare her because whatever it was made the sound, it wasn’t something creeping up on her. Nothing for ninety miles around thought she was prey. (9)

It is hard not to find this passage compelling. What black person living in the U.S. wouldn’t want to experience this kind of geographical security in their place of residence? However, when viewed in the context of the plot, we find that the passage is meant to be ironic, especially since the thought occurs in the midst of murderous violence wrought by a group of men from Ruby, who have taken it upon themselves to hunt down and kill the nine women living at the Convent located a few miles outside of the town. Understood in this context, the passage carries an air of menace, control. A woman living in Ruby might not consider herself to be “prey,” but such a feeling is contingent upon whether she recognizes that her sense of well-being is underwritten by the violence sanctioned by a select few among its residents.

I selected this passage from Paradise because it provides a useful demonstration of the overarching power of place. More specifically, it indicates the importance of what geographers have come to describe as place-making. Reading Paradise , we come to understand that the town of Ruby is sustained by an assertion of will. As far as the men attacking the Convent are concerned, residing in Ruby is akin to living “in paradise .” But as we will discover, occupying paradise always has its costs; place-making happens inside history and is always fraught with politics. Paradise acquires greater legibility with regard to place-making if we view it through the disciplinary lens of geography , which situates place as a fundamental aspect of its practice. ² Marco Antonsich , for example, discusses place in terms of an expanding notion of scale (ranging from the local to the continental). He argues that “place identity” is the product of “experiences, feelings, attitudes, and values, which are not only unconscious, but also conscious” (122). ³ And as Kevin R. Cox observes, any discussion of the politics of place must reflect territorial politics. “It is about including and excluding,” he writes, “establishing and defending boundaries, and laying claims to particular spaces and to inclusion in them on equal terms” (12). According to Cox, cities are not just a concentration of large numbers of bodies, structures, and systems, but also a system of “nodes that gather, flow, and juxtapose diversity, as places of overlapping—but not necessarily locally connected—relational networks, as perforated entities with connections that stretch far back in time and space,” leading to “spatial formations of continuously changing composition” (34). ⁴

Here, it is important to juxtapose the definitions of place from male geographers cited above with the work of feminist geographers . It is not my intent to insinuate feminist geographers are necessarily at odds with established definitions of place, but thinking about Toni Morrison’s novels in relation to the practices that underwrite acts of place-making, it becomes important to understand how feminist approaches to geography feminist geographers complicate the disciplinary assertion that “places are contested, fluid, and uncertain,” in which we find “multiple and changing boundaries, constituted and maintained by social relations of power and exclusion” (Massey, qtd. in McDowell, p. 4). As Linda McDowell argues in her book Place and Gender, the work of geographers like Neil Smith aptly describes place-making as a process that “implies the production of [geographical] scale in so far as places are made different from each other” (4). Like Smith , McDowell believes that it is “geographical scale that defines the boundaries and bounds the identities around which control is exerted and contested” (4). But geography’s attention to notions of locality are equally important and thus McDowell acknowledges the work of Doreen Massey , who argues, “localities are produced by the intersection of global and local processes—social relations that operate at a range of spatial scales” (4). And as Mona Domosh and Joni Seager point out, moving through space involves overcoming what they call the “friction of distance.” “Insisting that individual forms of mobility differ as one moves along the socio-economic continuum,” Domosh and Seager propose that attention to the concept of mobility needs to assume the body to be a logical starting point (110). They argue further, “Social norms, and the spaces constructed to hold those norms, shape what we think a body can and cannot do…In all societies there is an intertwined reciprocity between space, bodies, and the social construction of both—neither ‘space’ nor ‘bodies’ exist independently of a social imprint” (112).

Feminist geographers ’ attempts to problematize the concept of place, is incomplete without also figuring in the importance of mapping as a function of place-making. In her book, Shuttles Rocking in the Loom, Jennifer Terry relates how mapping constitutes a form of spatial politics which in turn evokes the political imaginary of the European colonial-project because of

Its loaded associations with colonial incursions, codification, and control; its rendition of geography as experienced from a particular vantage point, whether it claims otherwise or not; and more straightforwardly, its spatial emphasis. (1) ⁵

But Terry insists that writing in the African Diaspora proffers “a more diverse set of counter-geographies that speak to the African American and Caribbean experiences, each somehow affirming or reorienting in the face of oppression” (1). Through her effort to “counter scholarly atomization (sic) in terms of nation and language,” Terry ascertains the extent to which the histories of people of the diaspora must take into account the forms of displacement, disembodiment, and disenfranchisement synonymous with New World slavery and oppression. However, she also seeks to understand how writers in the U.S. and other points across the diaspora seek to reimagine the relationship between acts of mapping and identity formation. For example, she looks at Morrison’s Jazz with an eye toward how acts of displacement and eviction inhibit her characters’ ability to fashion coherent versions of themselves and the ways they must re-orient themselves to the spatial realities of the North in order to achieve it (18).

As I see it, the point of contact between the work I do in this study and Terry’s emerges around the notion of place-making and the creation of “counter-geographies ” involves the act of reimagining how maps function. Then, the act of place-making has to do with creating an alternative poetics of mapmaking. Here, Siobhan McEvoy-Levy ’s arguments regarding issues of place are persuasive, in particular McEvoy-Levy’s observation that, a place “is more than a physical space, a place is space plus meaning” (1). Seen in this regard, maps are meaning-laden enterprises whose interpretation is influenced by those who control the production of spatial meaning. Thus, place-making is

a process with an indefinable end. While places have a material reality, their meanings evolve over time and not in wholly predictable or controllable ways. Places are constantly reinterpreted and reconstituted, and entail ongoing power struggles and negotiations. Place-making, therefore, has a potentially intimate connection with the social, cultural, and political processes of peacebuilding. (2)

While the violence and discontent to be found in Morrison’s fiction would make it odd to equate place-making and peacebuilding, her fiction is replete with examples of agential place-making. In Sula , an example of place-making is the story of how an act of subterfuge that lets whites retain the best, most arable land and blacks come to occupy what is known as the Bottom. Another occurs in Song of Solomon when Mains Avenue becomes known, first, as Doctor Street and subsequently as Not Doctor Street, despite its designation on the town’s maps. The house Sula grows up in is described as “a house of many rooms,” and built to suit the specifications of Eva Peace “who kept on adding things: more stairways—there were three sets to the second floor—more rooms, doors and stoops. There were rooms that had three doors, others that opened out on the porch only were inaccessible from any other part of the house; others you could get to only by going through somebody’s bedroom” (30). Eva’s unruly approach to making a home leads her to take in Tar Baby as a tenant and burn her son, Plum, to prevent him from crawling back into her womb. Yet another instance can be found in Jazz when a parade of “silent black women and men marching down Fifth Avenue to advertise their anger over two hundred dead in East St. Louis” constitutes a moment when place-making, disaffection, and commemoration intersect. Finally, the two months in which Frank Money ’s ailing sister, Cee, is ministered to by “country women who loved mean” as they gather at Ethel Fordham’s house to make quilts and where Cee finds herself “[s]urrounded by their comings and goings, listening to their talk, their songs” and paying “them the attention she had never given them before” (122).

Thinking of these examples and many others, Geography and the Political Imaginary in the Fiction of Toni Morrison seeks to determine whether Morrison’s publication of Beloved in 1987 constitutes a departure from previously established iterations of place-making. Did the novel elaborate upon previously established notions of place or does it serve as a bellwether for what comes after in which the idea of place is troubled in new ways? Should we read the transition from Tar Baby , with its setting on a fictional island in the Caribbean in relation to Beloved with its marked return to the geographically and historically recognizable location of Cincinnati as an iterative gesture?

For answers, I turn to the closing pages of Beloved in order to bring these questions into focus. When Paul D hears Sethe claim that her murdered baby was her “best thing.” Paul D’s thoughts about Sethe makes him realize he

is staring at the quilt but he is thinking about her wrought-iron back; the delicious mouth still puffy at the corner from Ella’s fist. The mean black eyes. The wet dress steaming before the fire. Her tenderness about his neck jewelry—its three wands, like attentive baby rattlers, curving two feet into the air. How she never mentioned or looked at it, so he did not have to feel the shame of being collared like a beast. Only this woman Sethe could have left him his manhood like that. He wants to put his story next to hers. (322, my italics)

Paul D’s decision is indicative of what I am calling horizontal place-making . His desire to situate his own history alongside Sethe’s is a radical gesture since it eschews hierarchy in favor of a more paratactical approach to cohabiting with her, as if one story cannot be considered without taking heed of the other, as if a grammar of equivalence has emerged and taken root. Paul D’s realization that he wants to “put his story next to” Sethe’s, likewise rests on the assumption that she is her “best thing.” When Paul D tells Sethe, “me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow” (320), it is a gesture that dismantles the implicit connection between memory and injury in favor of imagination and aspiration by committing to overcoming the friction of distance that has undermined their efforts to cohabit in a space safe for them both.

I refer to the individual and collective forms of trauma Morrison’s characters experience as tight space . As I conceptualize it, tight space signals a character’s spiritual and emotional estrangement from community and the way it inhibits their ability to sustain a meaningful relationship to place. Tight space induces strategies that result in vertical forms of place-making which emphasizes individualism, materialism , violence, and abjection as key components of their estrangement. Only by eschewing verticality and opting for horizontal systems of collaboration and reconciliation that lead to more egalitarian and open forms of place-making can Morrison’s characters loose themselves from the tight space that immobilizes them.

She dramatizes this struggle by employing the recurring trope of the two-story house , where the spatial and domestic geographies we find in Morrison’s fiction are revealed to be sites of narrative contestation, where t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• Part I. North
• Part II. South
• Back Matter