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'Beloved': ideologies
in conflict, improvised subjects.
by Arlene R. Keizer
My father, by his nature, as well as by the habit of transacting
business as a skil[l]ful mechanic, had more of the feelings of a
freeman than is common among slaves. My brother was a spirited boy; and
being brought up under such influences, he early detested the name of
master and mistress. One day, when his father and his mistress happened
to call him at the same time, he hesitated between the two[,] being
perplexed to know which had the strongest claim upon his obedience. He
finally concluded to go to his mistress. When my father reproved him
for it, he said, "You both called me, and I didn't know which I ought
to go to first."
"You are my
child," replied our father, "and when I call you, you should come
immediately, if you have to pass through fire and water." (Harriet
Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl 9)
Introduction
This excerpt from Harriet Jacobs's narrative is a striking depiction of
dual interpellation under the slave system. Under North American and
Caribbean slavery, slaves were being "called" by at least two competing
systems: European American, white-supremacist, capitalist patriarchy
and the broken system of communal West African(1) cultural beliefs and
practices. Slave traders and slave masters were attempting to
re-interpellate as slaves the already interpellated subjects of West
African social, political, and religious systems- in other words, to
transform subjects into slaves. At the same time, they were attempting
to interpellate from birth those of African descent born into slavery.
In both cases, West African cultural mores and practices also operated,
fostering a culture of resistance within the black community. By
reading the conflict of interpellating systems in Toni Morrison's
Beloved, I hope to show how the novel intervenes in current debates
about black subjectivity, helping to define a position for the black
subject between essentialism and postmodern fragmentation.
Because Morrison is explicitly concerned with the formation of black
subjectivity, both individual and communal, it is appropriate to
compare her representation of this process to contemporary theoretical
writings about subject formation. If one examines Morrison's
representation of subjectivity-in-process in this context, it is clear
that her work bears a resemblance to Louis Althusser's influential
theory of ideology and interpellation, but it also challenges two
significant assumptions which underlie Althusser's theory: the
assumption of cultural homogeneity and the belief in most subjects'
tacit consent to ideology's demands. Morrison's representation of
slave/black subjectivity-in-process shines a light through the cracks
that appear in Althusser's theory as soon as it is applied to an actual
social formation. Thus, after discussing Beloved, I close this essay
with a critique of Althusser's "Ideology and Ideological State
Apparatuses" and a discussion of improvisation as a model for human
agency-in-resistance.(2)
In
Beloved, the capitalist, racial-caste system of American slavery
operates by dismembering, both figuratively and literally, the body and
spirit of the slave. The subjugated system of West African beliefs and
practices, in which family members who have died are kept alive in
memory and through ritual observances and in which nature is an aspect
of the Divine,(3) continues in its claim upon kidnaped Africans and
also reaches out to their enslaved descendants. The sites at which
these two systems come into conflict are the sites at which black
identities are formed, maintained, and transformed.
It is through improvisation, a common element of West African verbal
and musical styles infused into black New World culture by African
captives and their descendants,(4) that the characters in Beloved
integrate themselves as whole beings in the face of the
white-supremacist, capitalist system which threatens to pull them
apart. Morrison invokes the practices of verbal and musical
improvisation as signs and expressions of African American selfhood and
agency. Thus, after showing the forces that compete to create the
African American subject in the antebellum and post-bellum years,
Morrison goes beyond canonical theories of ideology and interpellation
to show how these subjects invent themselves out of the conflict
between ideologies, using improvisation as a form of self-fashioning.
Artistic expression allows African Americans to re-create and maintain
their identities in ways that their forced labor does not. In The Black
Atlantic, Paul Gilroy writes,
. .
. in the critical thought of blacks in the West, social self-creation
through labour is not the centre-piece of emancipatory hopes. For the
descendants of slaves, work signifies only servitude, misery, and
subordination. Artistic expression, expanded beyond recognition from
the grudging gifts offered by the masters as a token substitute for
freedom from bondage, therefore becomes the means towards both
individual self-fashioning and communal liberation. Poiesis and poetics
begin to coexist in novel forms- autobiographical writing, special and
uniquely creative ways of manipulating spoken language, and, above all,
the music (40)
Gilroy clearly
articulates the importance of artistic creation as self-creation in the
African diaspora. In The Signifying Monkey, critic Henry Louis Gates,
Jr., comments on one of Frederick Douglass's descriptions of the slave
songs and notes that the slave singers "were literally defining
themselves in language, just as did Douglass and hundreds of other
slave narrators" (Gates 647). Sethe, Paul D, Baby Suggs, and the black
community of Cincinnati are the literary descendants of these
self-defining slave singers (more than they are the descendants of
Douglass and the literate slave narrators). Their creations, though
rarely acknowledged as art (or even artful) by nineteenth-century white
mainstream society, were nevertheless artistic. As Morrison herself has
said, "Black Americans were sustained and healed and nurtured by the
translation of their experience into art, above all in the music"
("Living Memory" 181). The active discipline and play of improvisation,
in verbal and musical expression (and in household arts), is what
"re-members" the ex-slaves and allows them to live as free people,
though still oppressed by intolerable memories of bondage and
consistently dehumanizing treatment. Morrison's representations of
slave and ex-slave characters creating and performing African American
music, from field hollers to early blues, registers the profound
importance of improvisatory musical practices to the lives of those
enslaved and those emerging from the trauma of bondage.
I. Divided Subjects
As Beloved begins, the former slaves Sethe and Paul D meet again after
eighteen years of nominal freedom, time in which they have attempted to
bury their memories of enslavement and its attendant violations. The
"moments of being" by which the subjectivities of these once-enslaved
characters have been formed are told in "rememory," the active process
by which a memory "comes back whether we want it to or not" (Beloved
14). For Sethe and Paul D, trying to survive in the present, the past
is a dangerous undertow which threatens to drown them. Yet they must
incorporate their past experience into their present lives in order
truly to claim their freedom. Theirs is the struggle of the nominally
free slave to remake her/himself into an ontologically free subject.
They have cut off the positive as well as the negative aspects of their
histories; the knowledge that might sustain them spiritually is
consigned to the same forbidden area as the knowledge that might
destroy them. One of the major psychological imperatives for the free
former slaves is to fill in the absences created by slavery- to
reconnect with their ancestral pasts, their dead and living relatives
and friends, and their own "conscious community of memory" (Patterson
5).
Schoolteacher's "Call"
In Beloved, Schoolteacher is clearly the primary representative and
agent of the system of white-supremacist, capitalist patriarchy in the
era of slavery. His interpellations of Sethe, Paul D, Sixo, and Halle
lead to rebellion, madness, and death. Schoolteacher's system operates
by dismemberment, dividing the bodies and minds of the slaves into
separate parts and evaluating them through the use of scientific
techniques.(5) Dismemberment is both literal and metaphorical, and
either way it produces an effect on the physical bodies of the slaves.
Sethe first comes to understand her place in the slave system when she
hears Schoolteacher ask one of the nephews, "'Which one are you
doing?'" and the boy answers, "'Sethe,'" in response. She stops to
listen to what is being said about her and finds that Schoolteacher is
supervising his nephews as they catalog the "human" and "animal"
characteristics of the slaves at Sweet Home. As Sethe recalls the event
(mentally narrating it to Beloved), she describes her response:
I commenced to walk backward, didn't even look behind me to find out
where I was headed. I just kept lifting my feet and pushing back. When
I bumped against a tree my scalp was prickly. . . . My head itched like
the devil. Like somebody was sticking fine needles in my scalp. (193)
This is a peculiar scene of interpellation, a case of the subject being
called, literally and figuratively, but also indirectly, by the voice
of the master/state.(6) Sethe's response is one of complete negation.
She immediately begins walking in the opposite direction from the
"call," without even taking the time to turn around. Her body responds
in the negative before her mind has completely grasped the implications
of Schoolteacher's classifications.(7) Her scalp is still tingling when
she asks Mrs. Garner about the meaning of "characteristics" and fully
comprehends Schoolteacher s project.(8)
The inscription of the master produces a physical effect on the body of
the slave, and, indeed, the "writing" of Sethe is a prelude to the
violent milking of her breasts and the beating in which a "tree" is
imprinted on her back. These violent acts of inscription are
articulations of the "American grammar" that Hortense Spillers
identifies in the article "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe"- "the originating
metaphors of captivity and mutilation" which form a palimpsest over
which the history of African American life and cultural production is
written (Spillers 68). The nephew "does" Sethe on paper before he
"does" her in the barn, and she is undone, dismembered, by both of
these acts. This dismemberment is difficult to counteract. At the end
of the novel, when Sethe has been ground down by her memory's
relentless re-enactments of her intolerable past and by the demands of
the vengeful, needy presence of the daughter she killed, she is not
sure that she can hold herself together. She wonders, "Will he [Paul D]
do it [bathe her] in sections? First her face, then her hands, her
thighs, her feet, her back? Ending with her exhausted breasts? And if
he bathes her in Sections, will the parts hold?" (272).
At other points in Beloved, it is clear that Sethe lacks a sense of
herself as a distinct, whole being. When she tells Denver the story of
Denver's birth, she refers to herself in the third person, calling
herself "her children's mother" (30). Later in the story of Denver,
Sethe repeats her exact words to herself: "'I believe this baby's ma'am
is gonna die in wild onions on the bloody side of the Ohio River'"
(31). At these crucial moments- moments when she believes she is going
to die- she consistently envisions herself only as her children's
mother, eschewing any identification of herself for herself. She also
identifies her children as "parts" of herself- the only parts she wants
to claim, parts that have not been "dirtied" by the violations
perpetrated by the slave system and its agents. Sethe's murder of her
daughter is an abbreviated suicide; she has to kill her children before
she kills herself to be sure that they will not live to be brutalized
as she has been. This view of her children's lives as coterminous with
her own demonstrates her lack of a bounded sense of her own identity.
She is both shrunk down to nothing, finding it hard to say "I," and
magnified, spread out across the lives of her four children.
Paul D is also dismembered by the new master's interpellations. After
School- teacher and the patrollers have lynched Sixo, they lead Paul D
back to Sweet Home, discussing the fact that he must be sold:
Shackled, walking through the perfumed things honeybees love, Paul D
hears the men talking and for the first time learns his worth. He has
always known, or believed he did, his value- as a hand, a laborer who
could make profit on a farm- but now he discovers his worth, which is
to say he learns his price. The dollar value of his weight, his
strength, his heart, his brain, his penis, and his future. (226; my
emphasis)
Nine hundred dollars is
the price Schoolteacher attaches to Paul D's parts; under this
blatantly capitalist interpellation, Paul D cannot envision himself as
whole. In order to keep himself sane through the events that follow his
sale by Schoolteacher, Paul D maintains a compartmentalized self:
"After Alfred he had shut down a generous portion of his head,
operating on the part that helped him walk, eat, sleep, sing. If he
could do those things- with a little work and a little sex thrown in-
he asked for no more . . ." (41). He seals away the painful,
significant events of his past in a metaphorical tobacco tin that takes
the place of his heart. The tobacco-tin metaphor is a striking one,
making it clear that Paul D sees his ruined heart as a product of
slavery, as much as tobacco itself was. His life is circumscribed by
commerce, and it invades his body as well; he cannot be whole with the
symbol of his degradation lodged inside him.
Though it is certainly Schoolteacher's "corrections" which are the
immediate catalyst for Paul D's psychic disintegration and loss of
manhood, Paul D later comes to realize that Garner's form of slavery
was not entirely different from that of his brother-in-law:
For years Paul D believed schoolteacher broke into children what Garner
had raised into men. And it was that that made them run off. Now,
plagued by the contents of his tobacco tin, he wondered how much
difference there was between before schoolteacher and after. Garner
called and announced them men- but only on Sweet Home, and by his
leave. (220; my emphasis)
At the
distance created by eighteen years and a constant struggle to retain
his manhood, Paul D can recognize the tenuous nature of the identity
his master created for him and recognize that Garner, like
Schoolteacher, was playing God, indulging in a form of social
experimentation by "mak[ing] and call[ing] his own niggers men" (11).
Paul D understands how the masculine identity conferred by Gamer falls
apart upon Garner's death and reflects upon this in an economical,
vernacular rendering of Orlando Patterson's concept of "social death":
"Without his life each of theirs fell to pieces. Now ain't that slavery
or what is it?" (220).
In general,
the Garners represent a milder- and in some ways more subtle and
insidious- form of white-supremacist, capitalist domination of African
Americans. Their abolitionist friends, Mr. and Miss Bodwin, share
negative views of African Americans with slaveholders, despite their
belief that "human life is holy, all of it" (260). The statue that
Denver sees at the Bodwins' house is a representation of black
dismemberment in the service of the needs of whites:
His head was thrown back farther than a head could go . . . . Bulging
like moons, two eyes were all the face he had above the gaping red
mouth. His hair was a cluster of raised, widely spaced dots made of
nail heads. And he was on his knees. His mouth, wide as a cup, held the
coins needed to pay for a delivery or some other small service, but
could just as well have held buttons, pins, or crab-apple jelly.
Painted across the pedestal he knelt on were the words "At Yo Service."
(255)
This American grotesque is
missing a nose and has a head whose angle, in a real human being, could
only be accounted for by a broken neck. Nails have been hammered into
his head as a substitute for hair. His mouth is a receptacle for
anything the owner wants to put into it. The statue embodies
nineteenth-century white Americans' hatred of and fetishistic
attachment to the black body, and this symbolic dismemberment is an
analogue to the physical, mental, and spiritual onslaught perpetrated
by white-supremacist ideology.(9)
In Beloved, black individuals and the African American community try to
construct and maintain a sense of selfhood under the pressure of
atomizing injunctions from those in power. They use many different
strategies to heal and hold themselves together; some of these
strategies are drawn from philosophies and rituals of the West African
past, transformed through the Middle Passage and plantation life.(10)
"Called" by the Antelope
Subjugated by the patriarchal plantation system of American slavery,
Africans and their African American descendants were, socially,
nonpersons. As Orlando Patterson indicates in his foundational study of
slave systems, Slavery and Social Death,
Slaves differed from other human beings in that they were not allowed
freely to integrate the experience of their ancestors into their lives,
to inform their understanding of social reality with the inherited
meanings of their natural forebears, or to anchor the living present in
any conscious community of memory. That they reached back for the past,
as they reached out for the related living, there can be no doubt.
Unlike other persons, doing so meant struggling with and penetrating
the iron curtain of the master, his community, his laws, his policemen
or patrollers, and his heritage. (5)
For slaves then, the formation of normal human relations, both
imaginative and material, with both ancestors and descendants, and with
other members of an ethnic community, became by definition acts of
resistance within the slave system. Social ties that the slaves formed
"were never recognized as legitimate or binding" (Patterson 6), and
this fact had deep and lasting consequences for slave families and
communities. But what has often been overlooked in assessments of
slavery's toll on the enslaved is the specificity of the world views of
the African captives. The inability to "integrate the experience of
their ancestors into their lives, to inform their understanding of
social reality with the inherited meanings of their natural forebears,
or to anchor the living present in any conscious community of memory"
(Patterson 5) would have been a heavy burden for any group of human
beings. For the West and Central Africans kidnaped and enslaved in the
New World, this particular prohibition was a cultural catastrophe.
As critic Barbara Christian argues in "Fixing Methodologies: Beloved,"
"In not being able to remember, name, and feed those who passed on in
the Middle Passage, those who survived had to abandon their living dead
to the worst possible fate that could befall a West African: complete
annihilation" (13). Citing John Mbiti's African Religions and
Philosophy, Christian writes,
. .
. Mbiti warns us that, in traditional West African societies, Africans
do not worship their ancestors. Rather, they believe that when a person
passes (and this phrase is important, as it is still consistently used
by African Americans), that is, "dies," in the Western sense, they do
not disappear as long as someone remembers them, their name, their
character . . . . The acts of feeding the dead and pouring libations
are meant as symbols, active symbols of communion, fellowship, and
renewal. Thus continuity, not only of genes but also of active
remembering, is critical to a West African's sense of her or his own
personal being and, beyond that, of the beingness of the group.
Mbiti also points out that the ancestors are associated with their
land, the piece of Nature they inhabit. The people are the land, the
land is the people. He tells us: ". . . to remove Africans by force
from their land is an act of such great injustice that no foreigner can
fathom it." (11-12)
By calling our
attention to the African belief systems that were violently disrupted
by the slave trade and the North American and Caribbean system of
forced labor, Christian illuminates the cultural conflict at work in
slavery and represented by Morrison in Beloved. The African cultural
referents in Beloved have indeed been ignored by most critics, probably
because of the dearth of knowledge in the West about the actual
religious practices and philosophical traditions of African peoples.
Despite a growing body of literary, historical, anthropological, and
theological work produced in the past thirty to forty years, Africa
still remains a "dark continent" to many, if not most, Western readers;
few expect to find respectful evocations of African philosophy and
spirituality in a book that is being touted as a new classic in
American literature. Too often, slaves are still seen as Western
subjects manque, whose sense of themselves was constructed primarily in
terms of Eurocentric or Anglocentric concepts of self.(11) Morrison's
inclusion of African characters, belief systems, and practices in
Beloved illuminates the hidden lives of the slaves, the mental
attitudes and rituals that allowed some slaves to survive and to resist
their bondage.(12)
Despite the
power of the master's interpellations, Sethe and Paul D are also being
claimed by this broken but not entirely erased world of West African
cultural and spiritual practices. This alternative world view is
represented in the novel by Nan (the woman who took care of the young
Sethe), Sethe's mother, and Sixo. These three are African by birth,
survivors of the Middle Passage. They continue in the observance of
cultural and spiritual practices from their homelands, as far as their
enslaved condition allows. Nan and Sethe's mother are among the slaves
on the plantation where Sethe was born who dance "the antelope" and
other dances of African origin, as well as speaking to one another in
their native tongue. Sixo dances among the trees at night "to keep his
bloodlines open," (25) and maintains his connection to his native
language (though he seems to have no one with whom to speak it- it's
not clear if the Thirty-Mile Woman is from his ethnic group, or even
African by birth). For Nan, Sethe's mother, and Sixo, observances that
were once part of a hegemonic interpellating system in their native
countries have become, in the land of their exile and enslavement,
subversive. These African characters are engaged in resistance to the
dismembering logic of the white-capitalist, patriarchal system of
domination. Their resistance is produced not as a mere effect of the
relation of domination, but as a result of the subjugation of one
ideology by another incompatible ideology.
The Africans teach the New World children both by example and through
direct instruction, and both Sethe and Paul D reach for the meaning of
their own lives in connection with the lives of their ancestors. The
first-generation, New World children seek, in Patterson's words, "to
anchor the living present in [a] conscious community of memory" (5);
and the Africans they encounter, whether actual relatives or fictive
kin, transmit to them elements of a West African world view and call
them into the community of their ancestors.
For Sethe, the remnants of African cultural practices are an ambivalent
legacy, because they are tied up with her own motherlessness. Sethe has
rarely ever seen her mother; she learns to recognize her by her cloth
hat amid a sea of straw hats and by the circled cross branded under her
breast, which her mother goes out of her way to show her. Nan, her
surrogate mother,(13) tells Sethe more of her mother's story:
What Nan told her she had forgotten, along with the language she told
it in. The same language her ma'am spoke, and which would never come
back. But the message- that was and had been there all along. Holding
the damp white sheets against her chest, she [Sethe] was picking
meaning out of a code she no longer understood. Nighttime. Nan holding
her with her good arm, waving the stump of the other in the air.
"Telling you. I am telling you, small girl Sethe," and she did that.
She told Sethe that her mother and Nan were together from the sea. Both
were taken up many times by the crew. "She threw them all away but you.
The one from the crew she threw away on the island. The others from
more whites she also threw away. Without names, she threw them. You she
gave the name of the black man. She put her arms around him. The others
she did not put her arms around. Never. Never. Telling you. I am
telling you, small girl Sethe." (62)
As this memory returns to Sethe, she must translate Nan's words from
the African language in which they were spoken into English. She has
forgotten both the language and the story told in that language; as she
remembers the "message," she feels unfocused anger. On the one hand,
she is able to recover the knowledge that she was chosen by her mother.
On the other hand, she recognizes that she has been robbed of mothering
and her first language- in short, her birthright. This knowledge has
not just drifted away, it has been taken from her by the slave system.
As she remembers a moment of her interpellation as the chosen child of
an African mother, she yearns for Baby Suggs, the only,true mother she
has known.(14) Sethe's birth mother was clearly rebellious; she was
probably caught running away and hanged for this attempt. Sethe does
not want to believe that her mother attempted to escape, because it
would mean that she left her daughter behind. Her mother's abandonment
of her and the fact that Sethe never got enough milk when she was being
nursed are the tragedies at the very base of Sethe's life, and she
tries to compensate for her own motherlessness by being a supermother
to her children.
Other faint
memories also connect Sethe to African culture. As she is escaping
Sweet Home, she thinks of her unborn child as "the little antelope."
She wonders why "antelope" occurs to her, since she's never seen one;
then she remembers the African songs and dances on the plantation
before Sweet Home:
Oh but when
they sang. And oh but when they danced and sometimes they danced the
antelope. The men as well as the ma'ams, one of whom was certainly her
own. They shifted shapes and became something other. Some unchained,
demanding other whose feet knew her pulse better than she did. Just
like this one in her stomach. (31)
For its practitioners, the dance is a moment of plenitude, of genuine
beingness, and Sethe remembers it as such. Somehow her own being is
registered in the dance and, later, in the life of her unborn daughter
The dance and Sethe's memory of it are fragments of a system in which
those who are now slaves were valued as human beings The dancers
imitate the antelope, the principal qualities of which are speed and
free movement, and in so doing they reverse, at least temporarily,
their conditions of physical constraint. The freedom of the dance, the
way the dancers "shifted shapes and became . . . some unchained,
demanding other" contrasts sharply with the day's numbing, coerced work
routine Through this movement, they are able to reconnect body and
spirit; in the remembering and re-enactment of this African practice,
they are able to "re-member" themselves to some degree.(15)
From Sixo's example, Paul D understands what it means to be a man by
African standards, though he is not at all sure that he measures up to
Sixo's definition: "When he looks at himself through Garner's eyes, he
sees one thing. Through Sixo's, another. One makes him feel righteous.
One makes him feel ashamed" (267). He more than meets the criteria
established for manhood by the standards of the slaveholding
patriarchy; however, by Sixo's standards his behavior (especially in
leaving Sethe) is disappointing. Here again, as in the case of Sethe,
the African legacy produces ambivalence. Sixo's thirty-mile trips to
see his woman fill Paul D and the other Sweet Home men with deep
admiration, but they are mostly amused by and somewhat fearful of
Sixo's dancing amidst the trees at night. Although Paul D loves Sixo
"better than his brothers" (126), and although Sixo embodies the
integrity of African manhood, Paul D cannot simply adopt this model,
just as he cannot simply adopt Garner's. Paul D is, must be, a
different kind of man from either Sixo or Garner, as Sethe must be a
different woman from her African and Euro-American models- her mother,
Nan, and Mrs. Gamer (who is childless). The challenge for those coming
out of slavery was how to exercise their choices in becoming new
people, African Americans; how to create themselves from the conflict
of two cultures, one of them dedicated to denying the existence of the
other.
Healing Song for the Inner Ear(16): Improvisation and Community
It is improvisation, the creative rearrangement of traditional verbal
and musical structures to suit the expressive needs of the present
moment, that allows the African American characters to survive and to
re-create themselves. The African practices in themselves are not
enough; they must be transformed and incorporated into new
circumstances in such a way that they make sense to both the individual
and the community. When Sixo stops speaking English "because there [is]
no future in it" (25), it is clear that he is not and will not become
an African American. Painful as the knowledge may seem in the context
of slavery, the future for African Americans is in English (whether
Black English or standard English). The songs that Sethe and Paul D
create and sing are hybrids, with both African and Anglo/European
elements. These songs are on the cusp between work song and blues, sung
in a nineteenth-century version of Black English. As LeRoi Jones (Amiri
Baraka) writes in Blues People,
.
. . I cite the beginning of blues as one beginning of American Negroes.
Or, let me say, the reaction and subsequent relation of the Negro's
experience in this country in his English is one beginning of the
Negro's conscious appearance on the American scene. (xii)
Sethe and Paul D are not only at the point of beginning their free
lives as individuals; they are also at the beginning of the African
American community's experience of free life, at the beginning of
blues, at what Jones calls "one beginning of the Negro's conscious
appearance on the American scene." Verbal and musical improvisation,
both individual and communal, is one means through which the ex-slaves,
both singly and as a group, reaffirm their humanity and create
themselves as a new cultural entity.
The life of Baby Suggs most clearly represents the transition from
dismemberment to "re-memberment" through improvisatory self-creation.
Before she is freed she answers to the "bill-of-sale name" Jenny
Whirlow and doesn't call herself anything. In the narrator's/Baby
Suggs's description of the effects of slavery upon her, we see again
the metaphor of dismemberment: She decides to preach "because slave
life had 'busted her legs, back, head, eyes, hands, kidneys, womb and
tongue'" (87). Freed by her son's labor, she discovers her heart
(initially in the physical, and then in the metaphorical, sense) and
renames herself, coining and claiming the name Baby Suggs to register
the love and desire her slave husband felt for her and to help him find
her if he should be in a position to look. Manumission is a
resurrection from a living death in which she knows little about the
children she has borne (all but one of whom have been sold away from
her) and even less about herself. Baby Suggs claims her freedom by
claiming her body and her own unique qualities. Denver's name for her,
"Grandma Baby," embodies the contradictory miracle of an old woman
reborn in freedom.
Though not
African by birth, Baby Suggs creates her own syncretic folk religious
practice, based on both West African and Christian spiritual
traditions. The ceremony in the Clearing reveals the power of
individual and communal improvisation to reassemble broken bodies and
broken psyches. Baby Suggs issues her "Call" to men, women, and
children; their response is laughter, dancing, tears, and "long notes
held until the four-part harmony was perfect enough for their deeply
loved flesh (89).(17) In structure, the ceremony resembles a jazz
performance; it begins with three basic elements- children's laughter,
men's dancing, and women's weeping- and the congregation plays these
elements out in every possible combination, in the jazz ideal of group
improvisation. Then Baby Suggs comes in with her solo, her improvised
sermon about the need to love the body and the soul. Her spoken-word
solo segues into a dance, and the community provides the music to
accompany her. This ritual has the same effect as the antelope dance;
it provides a moment of plenitude in which the people can experience
themselves, re-member themselves, as whole and free, in an individual
and communal way. However, Baby Suggs's creation is a New World ritual,
a proto-jazz Black English blues spiritual healing song for the inner
ear. Jazz clarinetist Sidney Bechet's comments on the spirituals and
the blues shed light on Baby Suggs's ritual performance. Bechet states
that the spiritual "was praying to God" and the blues "was praying to
what's human. It's like one was saying, 'Oh, God, let me go,' and the
other was saying, 'Oh, Mister, let me be.' And they were both the same
thing in a way; they were both my people's way of praying to be
themselves, praying to be let alone so they could be human" (212-13).
With Baby Suggs leading, the community prays with voices, hearts, and
bodies to be allowed to be human.
Improvisation works for Sethe and Paul D as well. It allows them to
express and reflect upon their experience and serves as a sign of their
unique selves. Sethe composes and sings her own song to her children;
when Beloved hums this song, Sethe knows for certain that the girl is
the daughter she killed. While the only sure sign by which Sethe knew
her own mother was the circled cross branded under her breast, a
physical mark of her oppression, Sethe has been able to pass on
something different to her children, a verbal and musical mark of the
self that is undeniably and irrevocably her own. At the end of the
novel, we know that there is hope for her return from madness because
she is singing her song to herself when Paul D visits her in the
keeping room.
Musical
improvisation is a practice that saves Paul D from madness and death.
In Alfred, Georgia, while he is forced to work and live like an animal,
he and the other slaves with whom he works help each other through the
ordeal by singing:
They sang it
out and beat it up, garbling the words so they could not be understood;
tricking the words so their syllables yielded up other meanings. They
sang the women they knew; the children they had been; the animals they
had tamed themselves or seen others tame. They sang of bosses and
masters and misses; of mules and dogs and the shamelessness of life.
They sang lovingly of graveyards and sisters long gone. Of pork in the
woods, meal in the pan; cane, rain and rocking chairs . . . . Singing
love songs to Mr. Death, they smashed his head. (108-09)
In Alfred, Georgia, the shout and the work song are called upon daily
to get the men through. They not only sing songs they know; they
transform those songs and create new ones. They are able to preserve
their manhood and their humanity through communal improvisation.
Because slaves cannot speak freely to one another, the shout and the
song must carry all of the expressive needs of the moment. The song
changes when the expressive needs change. At 124, "the songs [Paul D]
knew from Georgia were flat-headed nails for pounding and pounding and
pounding. . . . They were too loud, had too much power for the little
house chores he was engaged in" (40). Instead, Paul D takes a melody he
knows and improvises lyrics about himself and Sethe; his composing and
singing allow him to meditate on and express his experience, without
being overwhelmed by it. The songs he creates are also signs of his
individual self. Here again it is useful to refer to Jones's Blues
People, where, in discussing the movement from field holier to work
song to blues in African American culture, the author notes the
identification of particular "shouts" with individuals:
Each man had his own voice and his own way of shouting- his own life to
sing about. The tenders of those thousands of small farms became almost
identified by their individual shouts. "That's George Jones, down in
Hartsville, shoutin' like that." (61)
Hi Man, the leader of the chain gang in Alfred, Georgia, is named for
his shout; through details like these, Morrison traces not only the
trajectory of the characters' lives, but also the evolution of the
music, in which the importance of vocal style as individual signature
persisted. Paul D's "Bare feet and chamomile sap, / Took off my shoes;
took off my hat" are a sign of the individual, reflective self in
relation both to the tradition out of which he is singing and to Sethe
and his own history. The full text of Paul D's improvised song begins
the penultimate chapter of the novel, and by that point in the
narrative, the song has become a factual and emotional record of the
recent history of his relationship with Sethe and his encounters with
Beloved, told through a combination of original lines and standard.work
song/blues lines. The rhymed resolution of this piece- "Love that woman
till you go stone blind. / Stone blind; stone blind. / Sweet Home gal
make you lose your mind" (263)- reflects both Paul D's deep feelings
for Sethe and his regret at having been unable, for a time, to see her
and her dilemma clearly.
Thus for
Baby Suggs, Sethe, and Paul D, improvisation functions as an
integrative device, a form of self-fashioning. It is also clear from
their stories that part of the importance of improvisation, whether in
ritual or in song, is relational. Baby Suggs and the black community of
Cincinnati, Sethe and her children, Paul D and Sethe- the song sung in
the presence of others helps to heal and integrate the individual and
the community.
The importance of
the collective is also illustrated by the disaster that occurs when
community falls apart- when the neighbors become envious of Baby Suggs
and her family and fail to warn them of Schoolteacher's approach. After
Schoolteacher and his henchmen come into Baby Suggs's yard, her big
heart begins to give out, and she takes to her bed to study color. Her
ability to respond to "the Misery" by meditating on something harmless
is a testament to the strength of her life-force; it takes three years
of thinking about colors to wear out Baby Suggs's heart completely.
This slow death is also an improvisation of a kind. Meditating on
color(18) is a response that says a great deal about Baby Suggs's life
philosophy; though she has been harmed over and over again, she doesn't
think about revenge, even in her most bitter moments, when she
concludes that there is "no bad luck in the world but whitepeople"
(104).(19) Instead, she "declare[s] peace" (177). Baby Suggs's final
improvisation is a solitary one, however, and while it has the power to
soothe her mind, it doesn't reach beyond her to the community in the
way that her Call in the Clearing did. Schoolteacher's actions have, to
her mind, invalidated her Call, and the community has stepped back as a
rebuke to what they see as her hubris.(20) Thus the failure of
community, the fact that no one warns them of Schoolteacher's approach,
is a significant element in Baby Suggs's slow demise; she is left to
improvise with only her daughter-in-law and her remaining grandchildren
for company. For Sethe, isolation from the community is almost fatal,
but finally she is rescued from Beloved by the improvised song of
thirty neighborhood women, in a ceremony reminiscent of Baby Suggs's in
the Clearing.
Many critics have
noted the emphasis on community throughout Morrison's work. Valerie
Smith, in Self-Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative,
states that ". . . Morrison does not provide her people with the option
of living underground, in isolation, beyond community. Her characters
achieve autonomy and a sense of identity only to the extent that they
can understand and name themselves in relation to a social unit . . ."
(123). Thus, Paul D's mental and emotional compartmentalization can
only be undone through his connection to Sethe and, ironically,
Beloved.(21) When Paul D returns to Sethe, he remembers Sixo's comments
about the Thirty-Mile Woman, and they signify to him the healing,
re-membering possibilities of loving, human connection:" 'She is a
friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them
and give them back to me in all the right order. It's good, you know,
when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind'" (272-73).
Improvisation and communal values are linked; sometimes separately and
sometimes in tandem they help to re-member the ex-slaves in the novel's
Reconstruction era Cincinnati community.
If we accept improvisation as a sign of human agency, we can begin to
see how theories of domination fall short in their accounts of the
creation of subaltern selves. African American culture is one arena
that indicates that the oppressed individual does not simply accept the
dominant ideology; other ideologies provide conflicting interpretations
of experience and conflicting expectations. The self, with the help of
the community, responds in a unique way, accepting some aspects of
ideology as given and choosing among other available elements in the
construction of an individual subjectivity. Morrison's representations
of black subjectivity-in-process thus enable us to assess the ways in
which Althusser's influential account of ideology and interpellation
might be refashioned to apply to African American lives during and
after slavery and, more generally, to the lives of the dominated in
societies marked by profound racial and ethnic stratification.
II. Ideologies in Conflict
In order to analyze ideology, inter pellation, and resistance under a
bicultural system, the theories of Althusser and his followers must
take into account the processes of ideological conflict- conflict
between world views- within a single socioeconomic formation. American
slavery was just such a system, involving a conflict between
ideologies: Eurocentric, capitalist patriarchy, and African communal
systems of subsistence agriculture. In Althusser's "Ideology and
Ideological State Apparatuses," certain assumptions about social
formations undergird the theoretical framework and render it
problematic in a bicultural or multicultural context like American
slavery. First among these is the assumption that the culture under
study is homogeneous and that the repressive state apparatuses and the
ideological state apparatuses generally produce docile, conforming
citizens. Resistance under social formations such as these is created
as an effect of ideology, in a dialectical manner. Althusser writes,
"This concert [of the ideological state apparatuses acting in tandem]
is dominated by a single score, occasionally disturbed by
contradictions (those of the remnants of former ruling classes, those
of the proletarians and their organizations): the score of the Ideology
of the current ruling class . . ." (154)(22) In Althusser's analysis,
the homogeneity of society is disrupted only by those who were formerly
in power and those whose resistance is produced by the repressiveness
of the system. Other commentators on Althusser's work have revised this
aspect of his theory. For example, Paul Smith, in Discerning the
Subject, summarizes ideology's production of dissent thus:
. . . the interpellation of the "subject" into oppressed positions is
not complete and monolithic; rather, interpellation also produces
contradiction and negativity. The necessary existence of various and
different subject-positions in the interpellated "subject" produces
resistance to the logic of domination while still being in a sense part
of, or a by-product of, that logic. (152)
While this statement includes refinements of Althusser's theory
(subject-positions within the "subject"), both Althusser's original
articulation and most subsequent refinements have failed to account for
resistance that is produced differently, through the conflict between
profoundly divergent ideologies, one subjected to the other.
Lisa Lowe is one critic who has analyzed Althusserian interpellation in
relation to literary representations of a hybrid cultural situation. In
an essay on Korean American writer Theresa Cha's experimental novel
Dictee, entitled "Unfaithful to the Original: The Subject of Dictee,"
Lowe writes,
A closer
investigation of the instances of subject formation discussed in Dictee
reveals that Cha episodically focuses on sites of interpellation which
are not only multiple, but are also hybrid, unclosed, and uneven. The
focus on these instances suggests that resistances to the hegemony
reproduced by interpellating structures are not located simply or
exclusively in the antagonisms produced by their demands for identity,
but that it also may be the non-identity of the irregularly multiple
sites to those demands for uniformity which founds the condition of
both inadequate interpellation and the subject's resistance to
totalization. (56)
That is,
resistance is not only produced as a "by-product" of interpellation,
but the conflict between interpellating systems may also be responsible
for what Althusser calls "bad subjects," subjects who do not accede to
the demands of the dominant culture. Lowe goes on to argue that "Dictee
is more specific [than Althusser's essay] about multiple hailings,
particularly about the conflicts and noncorrespondences between hailing
apparatuses," and that, "within this multiplicity, one site of
interpellation may provide the means or instruments with which to
disrupt another apparatus" (56). This reading of Dictee is extremely
instructive for my own reading of Beloved, because similar claims can
be made for Morrison's novel.
My
argument differs from Lowe's in two significant particulars. First,
Lowe is primarily concerned with the ways in which the overlapping
contradictions produced by various systems of domination- capitalism,
colonialism, patriarchy- can be played against one another, how the
"bad subject" of all three systems can mobilize her contradictory
identity in one to confound her interpellation by another. My chief
concern is with how subjects choose among the conflicting
interpellations of capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy, on the
one hand, and African belief systems and practices, on the other, and
from this cacophony create and maintain some sense of harmony and
wholeness. Second, Lowe affirms the value of the textual strategies of
"discontinuity" and "fragmentation" (62) in her discussion of Cha's
work. Though Morrison deploys some similar textual strategies in
representing the discontinuity and fragmentation of slaves' and
ex-slaves' lives, her concern with the pain these conditions wrought in
African American life and history leads me into a different emphasis in
my analysis, an emphasis on the creation of relatively whole selves and
relatively whole communities. Because physical pain is
"world-destroying" (29), in Elaine Scarry's words, and because pain
certainly destroyed the worlds of enslaved Africans and their
descendants, the world had to be made anew by those coming out of
slavery. Improvisation remakes the world. Like other acts of creation,
it reverses the "structure of unmaking" (Scarry 20) that is torture and
helps to re-member the body in relation to the social whole.
I am not attempting here to recuperate an essential African American
subject; I am, however, noting that all fragmented subjects may not
feel the same way about their fragmentation. Enslaved African Americans
experienced the process of "all that is solid melt[ing] into air" (Marx
338) under particularly intolerable conditions; there is no reason that
they would have celebrated a shattered body or a shattered
consciousness, even when they were able to create something sustaining
from it.(23)
Even with the
ever-present threat of violence, the ideology of American slavery was
never able to produce, on a large scale, docile, conforming subjects
who, in Althusser's terms, "workled] by themselves" (181); that is,
wholly internalized the values and carried out the commands of the
dominant culture. Morrison's Beloved represents the fact that competing
West African ideologies, though operating only partially or
significantly transformed in their New World setting, allowed many
African/African American subjects to interrupt or turn aside from the
hegemonic call, not only through overt resistance but also through
improvisation in everyday cultural activities.
III. Improvisation as a Model for Human Agency-in-Resistance
In its transformation from African to African American cultural
practice, improvisation has undergone a seachange. Under oppressive
conditions, it has become a sign of resistance to interpellation by the
dominant culture, a refusal of that culture's norms, not by outright
rejection but by re-interpretation and integration with African and
other cultural influences. In the words of critic Houston Baker, "The
song is a sign of an Afro-American discourse that strikingly refigures
life on American shores" (16). Especially in the context of early (and
continuing) Eurocentric views of blacks, improvisation is particularly
significant because of its distance from mimicry.(24) Poets from the
time of Phillis Wheatley on have been dubbed "mockingbirds" (whether
explicitly or implicitly); Black English is often seen as English
poorly spoken; and black culture in general is seen as helplessly
deviating from the American norm, which it supposedly seeks to
reproduce. An understanding of improvisation as a cultural mode in
African American life undercuts these hostile and patronizing
mainstream readings of black culture. Instead, one is forced to
recognize the intentionality behind transformations of European and
Euro-American cultural forms in African American culture, the will and
intelligence behind black style.
Improvisation is a three-stage process, and in order to name these
stages, I borrow terms from the critics Houston Baker and VeVe Clark.
In an essay entitled "Developing Diaspora Literacy and Marasa
Consciousness," Clark briefly describes two major concepts from Baker's
work, and transforms them by adding her own third term:
Representations of African diaspora history and culture have assumed a
binary formation- us and the Others- a residual construction from the
master/slave heritage. Houston Baker in his Modernism and the Harlem
Renaissance (1987) re-examines the binary oppositions existing between
the ideologies of Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois. From that
encounter two intriguing discursive strategies have been
identified-mastery of form/deformation of mastery. As I read Baker's
work, I was aware that a third principle might well exist beyond the
oppositional framework within which we have interpreted new letters. I
have termed that third principle the reformation of form, a
reduplicative narrative posture which assumes and revises Du Bois's
double consciousness. In the wider field of contemporary literary
criticism, this reformative strategy approximates the deconstruction of
mastery. (Clark 42)
Clark goes on
to note how black music, jazz in particular, "has provided examples of
contextual and formal re-presentations by mastering form/deforming
mastery and reforming form" (42), and she cites John Coltrane's
arrangement and performance of "My Favorite Things" as an exemplary
"text." These three terms- mastery of form, deformation of mastery, and
reformation of form- can be used to designate the three formal stages
of improvisation, whether in verbal, musical, literary, visual, or
household arts.
The Baker-Clark
formulation lends itself particularly well to my analysis, because
Baker's work is grounded in the binary opposition of American slavery,
as Beloved is, and Clark's work moves beyond the binary to a third
term, which is the direction in which Beloved points. The improviser
understands what is expected of her/him and may begin by performing it
according to traditional rules (mastery of form). The improviser then
deliberately disrupts the traditional form by introducing other
elements into it, elements drawn from other contexts, or by using the
instrument in a significantly different manner from the way it has been
used in the past (deformation of mastery). Finally, the piece composed
from both traditional elements(25) and non-traditional, improvised
elements is a new whole, with internal integrity (reformation of form).
Writer Ralph Ellison, in the essay "The Charlie Christian Story,"
describes improvisation in jazz in a way that illuminates the points I
have made and connects improvisation to the creation of identity:
. . . true jazz is an art of individual assertion within and against
the group. Each true jazz moment . . . springs from a contest in which
the artist challenges all the rest; each solo flight, or improvisation
represents (like the successive canvases of a painter) a definition of
his identity: as individual, as member of the collectivity and as a
link in the chain of tradition. Thus, because jazz finds its very life
in an endless improvisation upon traditional materials, the jazzman
must lose his identity even as he finds it. . . . (234)
The refigurative properties and collage techniques of improvisation in
African American culture make it an apt metaphor for human
agency-in-resistance in general. The stages of improvisation can serve
as a model of how a resistant human subject comes into being: first by
learning what the dominant ideology expects of her/him and performing
it "properly," then by disrupting the expected performance with
non-traditional elements (which may come from another
culture/interpellating system), and finally by integrating the
hegemonic and the non-traditional elements into a new entity with the
structure and fluidity of a free jazz composition. This subject is
neither seamlessly whole nor completely dispersed into separate
subject-positions. Being resistant to ideology does not place this
subject outside ideology; she/he must improvise continually to
challenge the ideological injunctions of the dominant culture. This is
a subject consistently in process, recognizable as a distinct entity
both to her/himself and to others, caught up in compliance and
resistance, obedience and contradiction. For this subject and for
communities of resistant subjects, artistic creation- "endless
improvisation upon traditional materials"- can facilitate greater and
greater resistance to hegemonic ideology.
Notes
1. Because most slaves in the Americas came from West Africa, and
because many Africanisms in North American and Caribbean culture appear
to be derived from West African ethnic groups, I will be using the
adjective West African to describe the cultural practices and beliefs
the slaves brought with them to the Americas. I will also use African
as a more general designation for those who survived the Middle
Passage. While I am aware of the problems of homogenizing Africa into a
single entity, the similarities between West African/African ethnic
cultures and the extent to which these cultures merged in the Americas
make West African culture as legitimate a term as Western civilization
for the present purposes.
2. Some
critics may question my use of Althusser's theory in the context of
slavery. I recognize that applying Althusser's concepts of ideology and
interpellation to a system more coercive and less consensual than
modern, Western, industrial capitalism is controversial. However, it is
my intention to highlight the capitalist nature of the U.S. slave
system and to note the operation of ideological state apparatuses in
the context of consistent physical violence. It is also important for
me to emphasize the fact that I am applying Althusser's theory to
Morrison's representation of slavery, not directly to the institution
itself.
3. See John S. Mbiti's
African Religions and Philosophy for an extended discussion of these
aspects of traditional African societies.
4. See Blassingame 22 and Levine 6.
5. A number of critics have noted the theme of dismemberment in
Beloved. In "Toni Morrison's Beloved: Re-Membering the Body as
Historical Text," critic Mae Henderson eloquently makes this argument
in the context of a psychoanalytic reading of the novel. Her assertion
that "the act of remembering, for the unlettered slave, constitutes the
act of constructing a private self" (73) serves as a foundation for my
assertion that the ex-slave's self is constructed and expressed through
musical improvisation.
6. Film
scholar Mary Ann Doane notes this type of indirect interpellation in a
discussion of Frantz Fanon's "The Fact of Blackness" (Chapter Five in
Black Skin, White Masks). She writes, "Fanon persistently returns to
the imperative call- 'Look, a Negro!'- uttered by a little white boy in
a state of fascination and terror. The call is a somewhat perverse
version of the Althusserian process of interpellation or hailing.
Although it addresses and refuses to address the black directly (the
second-person pronoun is not used), the exclamation fixes the black
person, producing a subjectivity which is fully aligned with a process
of reification" (224). Though I agree with Doane's argument about the
intended effect of the call, one of my primary arguments in this essay
is that such sideways hailings, and the direct, classic version of
interpellation, do not inevitably produce "a subjectivity which is
fully aligned with a process of reification." Sethe's resistance makes
this clear.
7. See, for example, Sander Gilman's essay "Black Bodies, White
Bodies."
8. Months later, when Sethe kills her daughter, the physical sensation
of needles in her scalp recurs; she thinks of the needles as the beaks
of hummingbirds, and she herself flies to put her children beyond reach
of the whip, the bit, and the measuring tape. Finally, Sethe's
"mistaken" attack on Mr. Bodwin is also attended by needles in the
scalp and the sound of hummingbird wings. Though technically Sethe is
mistaken as to the identity of the white man coming into her yard,
there is a great deal of symbolic meaning in Mr. Bodwin's coming for
one of her daughters. He's not coming to enslave Denver, but he is
going to put her to work in domestic service. Her experience of labor
may not differ significantly from that of many slaves.
9. See Marlon Riggs's film Ethnic Notions for an extended critique of
objects such as these. As any number of recent controversies
demonstrate, hatred of and fetishistic attachment to the black body
have persisted into the 1990s.
10.
Robert Farris Thompson's groundbreaking study Flash of the Spirit
illuminates the artistic and philosophical connections between West
Africa and Afro-America. He records the transformation of cultural
philosophies from one context to the other.
11. This is one of the negative consequences of the primacy of the
slave narratives; in them, personhood is constructed primarily in
Western terms.
12. In a remarkable
article entitled "Keys to the Ancestors' Chambers: An Approach to
Teaching Beloved," Valorie Thomas shows how Morrison has drawn upon
Yoruba and Kongo spiritual traditions throughout the novel. She argues,
convincingly, that the main characters have characteristics of West
African orisha, and that the graphics which introduce the novel's
sections are related to ritual drawings from Kongolese tradition. This
essay is the most extensive discussion of African influences in Beloved
that I am aware of.
13. Nan and
Sethe's mother are "shipmate" relatives, fictive kin whose source of
connection is their experience of the Middle Passage. In a number of
New World, African-descended cultures, these relationships were a very
important source of identification and resistance for slaves (Price
27-28; Mullin 37-38).
14. Of
African beliefs regarding death and remembrance, theologian John Mbiti
writes, ". . . while the departed person is remembered by name, he is
not really dead: he is alive, and such a person I would call the
living-dead" (32). After death, Baby Suggs is among the "living-dead,"
remembered and called upon for emotional sustenance by both Sethe and
Denver.
15. Beloved's return in
the flesh is in itself an extended evocation of certain African belief
systems. Beloved is a complex, contradictory character; she is both the
daughter Sethe killed and the embodiment of the individual and communal
dismemberment of African Americans. She is a catalyst of positive
events, helping Sethe and Paul D to reconnect with their pasts, yet she
also forces Paul D into an anguished re-assessment of his manhood and
almost destroys Sethe. It is important to look at Beloved in the
context of African spirituality because many enslaved Africans and
their descendants retained concepts of reincarnation and the afterlife
that account for the girl's return. It is striking how easily the
African American community around 124 Bluestone accepts the fact that
Beloved is the reincarnation of Sethe's dead child. Janey, the Bodwins'
domestic servant, even knows what signs to ask for (lines in the palm
of the hand) to determine if the girl is in fact a re-embodied spirit.
As Morrison herself says, ". . . it was clear to me that it [Beloved's
incarnation] was not at all a violation of African religion and
philosophy; it's very easy for a son or a parent or a neighbor to
appear in a child or in another person" ("In the Realm" 249).
In representing Beloved as an actual human being, Morrison has
registered the continued existence of two African traditional religious
beliefs, one from the Yoruba and Igbo, and one from the Akamba people
of Kenya. In discussing the character Beloved, Carole Boyce Davies
writes of "the legendary abiku children of Yoruba cosmology or the
ogbanje in Igbo culture, who die and are reborn repeatedly to plague
their mothers and are marked so that they can be identified when they
return" (139). And according to John Mbiti, among the Akamba people of
Kenya, a child who dies before she is named is still an "object"
belonging to the spirits; she has not been ritually separated from the
world of the spirits and the ancestors (the living-dead) (Mbiti 156).
Like Beloved, a child like this has a foot in both the human and the
spirit worlds.
16. This is the title of a book of poems by Michael S. Harper.
17. The antiphonal structure of Baby Suggs's ceremony is another
element that connects it to West African musical traditions. Many
scholars of African and African American music have commented on the
use of antiphony and the tendency to incorporate body movements into
musical performance in both traditions. See, for example, Oily Wilson's
articles on these topics.
18. Baby Suggs's choice of color as the object of meditation deserves
far greater elaboration than I am able to give it here.
19. A remarkable reversal of American social norms is subtly enacted
throughout Beloved. Whiteness is consistently marked while blackness is
represented as the standard human condition. To be black is to be among
the people; to be white is to be set apart, marked. The word white,
attached to man, woman, boy, or girl, designates a range of subject
positions, all determined to a significant extent by their
participation, direct or indirect, literal or psychological, in the
subjugation of black people. Whites use blacks as a mirror in which
they see themselves magnified; this magnification creates other
distortions, visible and palpable to blacks but largely invisible to
whites themselves. Morrison has spoken explicitly about the
transformation of Europeans and Euro-Americans wrought by slavery:
"Slavery broke the world in half, it broke it in every way. It broke
Europe. It made them into something else, it made them slave masters,
it made them crazy" ("Living Memory" 178).
20. Baby Suggs is reduced to/chooses the world of the seen over the
unseen; she says to Stamp Paid, "'What I know is what I see: a nigger
woman hauling shoes'" (179). This is a direct rejection of her faith ("
'Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not
seen' ") and her call to preach.
21. See Thomas 93.
22.The metaphor of the concert is a particularly felicitous one in
terms of my analysis. The European symphonic music to which Althusser
alludes is typically performed as written; improvisation has little or
no place in the concert's formal setting. One can see how
improvisation, a fundamental aspect of jazz, might serve as a useful
model for resistance to the repressive, capitalist system for which the
concert is Althusser's trope.
23.
These references to the pain and torture enforced upon black bodies
under slavery lead me to another critique of "Ideology and Ideological
State Apparatuses." Althusser's theory assumes that capitalist social
formations operate primarily by consent, with the threat of coercion.
North American and Caribbean slavery, though capitalist, operated
primarily by physical and psychological coercion; to the slaves, the
system only rarely disguised its nature with benevolence (to the
outside world, of course, the system presented itself as a benevolent
patriarchy). In Marx's view, slavery was "direct forced labor," whereas
wage labor was "indirect forced labour" (Marx, qtd. in Patterson 2).
Much has been made of the distinction between these two forms; in this
context, it is important to emphasize the similarities between them.
Accepting that direct coercion was fundamental to American slavery, one
must then consider how constant physical violence changes the operation
of the ideological state apparatuses, and how the oppressed group
responds. While it is not possible here to discuss direct coercion and
ideology at length, it is important to note that capitalism and
consistent physical coercion are not mutually exclusive or even
particularly incompatible. It is too easy to think of slavery or
conditions similar to slavery as anomalies in the modern or postmodern
world. If one accepts the idea that North American and Caribbean
slavery was, in certain important respects, a capitalist socioeconomic
formation, it is then necessary to refigure theories about subject
formation under capitalism to include the effects of consistent
physical abuse as a factor in interpellation. (Feminist theory has made
clear the importance of physical coercion in the formation of female
subjects under patriarchy. Catherine MacKinnon's work, in particular,
addresses this point.) Theorizing physical coercion under capitalism
will not only illuminate the past; it will also illuminate the present
working conditions of many factory and prison workers in the developing
and the overdeveloped worlds.
24.
Homi Bhabha's acclaimed essay "Of Mimicry and Man" shows how the
inevitable difference produced through mimicry deconstructs colonial
discourse; however, he does not address the ways in which colonial or
white-supremacist discourse is deliberately deconstructed through
"signifying" and improvisatory revision.
25. African American music contains elements of both European and
African music, combined into a new whole. At least two traditional
forms are being improvised upon. Scholar Charles Keil writes, "The
Afro-American tradition represents not only a variety of mixtures
between European and African elements but a series of blendings within
itself" (33).
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Arlene R. Keizer is Assistant Professor of English Language and
Literature at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She would like to
express her gratitude to the American Association of University Women
(AAUW) for providing fellowship support which facilitated the
completion of this article. She would also like to thank Barbara
Christian and M. Giulia Fabi for their critical commentary on
successive versions of this piece.
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