Representation, race, and the "language" of the ineffable in Toni Morrison's narrative

African American Review, Summer, 1999 by Abdellatif Khayati

Morrison has confessed that, when she wrote the novel, she feared that it would be her least read book because "it is about something the characters don't want to remember, I don't want to remember, black people don't want to remember, white people don't want to remember. I mean, it's national amnesia" ("Pain" 120). Morrison's grappling with the "unspeakable" for her characters - namely, the fear that to evoke a past degradation may diminish them, humiliate them, and shame them - is clear from the way in which they try to force forgetting into a willed activity. Sethe couldn't bring herself to talk about her past "because every mention of her past life hurt. Everything in it was painful or lost. She and Baby Suggs had agreed without saying so that it was unspeakable; to Denver's inquiries Sethe gave short replies or rambling incomplete reveries" (Beloved 58). The sense of shame arising from this painful past is even more concretized in the image of "that tobacco tin buried in [Paul D's] chest where a red heart used to be. Its lid rusted shut" (72-73). But Morrison turns this very impossibility of telling for her characters into a possibility of narration. As she turns the self-censuring re-memories of her characters into a rhetoric of silence which points to the abysmal experience and missing details in the life of her characters that escape inscription, she demonstrates that confronting the past is liberating.

In other words, Morrison transforms the reservations of her characters into a narrative prose in which silence becomes a protest against assimilationist tendencies. This kind of silence is different from the dropping of "a veil" that Morrison speaks of in relation to traditional slave narratives. Whereas old slave narratives exercised a willed omission of trauma as a defensive armor against humiliating or embarrassing memories, Morrison's strategic silence seeks to disrupt the very forces of assimilation and cultural hegemony that would lock others into helplessness and sanctioned ignorance. Sethe's circling around the subject becomes a narrative problematic of "pinning" down her story:

Sethe knew that the circle she was making around the room, him, the subject, would remain one. That she could never close in, pin it down for anybody who had to ask. If they didn't get it right off - she could never explain. Because the truth was simple, not a long-drawn-out record of flowered shifts, tree cages, selfishness, ankle ropes and wells. Simple: she was squatting in the garden and when she saw them coming and recognized schoolteacher's hat, she heard wings. Little hummingbirds stuck their needle beaks right through her headcloth into her hair and beat their wings. And if she thought anything, it was No. No. Nono. Nonono. (163)

The issue here, in my view, is that language that is life-sustaining can only gesture toward understanding experience; it cannot master experience. In fact, this passage is an example of Morrison's conception of the stirring, seductive language whose "chosen silence, unmolested language surges toward knowledge, not its destruction" ("Nobel" 7). The purpose of this textual intransigence is to question the will to knowledge and power, allowing difference some space.