The One All-Black Town Worth the Pain: American Exceptionalism, Historical Narration, and the Critique of Nationhood in Toni Morrison's Paradise - African - Critical Essay

African American Review, Summer, 2001 by Katrine Dalsgard

To say that Paradise narrates the African American community's aspirations in exceptianalist terms, however, is not the same as to say that Morrison accepts such terms. I will argue that in her most recent novel she assumes a position in relation to exceptionalism that is less affirmative than the position taken by mast previous African American writers and texts, including her own. As Byers reads the ending of her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), it asserts "that the destruction of Pecola Breedlove, a young Black girl, is a failure of the land, and. . . the failure of the land is the failure of the people" (98). Using the form of the jeremiad, in other wards, in this novel Morrison writes from the position of a black outsider who blames the predominantly white nation for its failure to extend its exceptionalist promises to its black population, and by forging her critique in this way, she indirectly reaffirms the exceptionalist narrative. This strategy is even more clearly seen in King's famous "I Have a Dream" address (1963), in which King at first charges the predominantly white American nation with its continued failure to redeem the promises extended to its African American population by one of its ancestral heroic figures, President Lincoln, in the Emancipation Proclamation and then, offering a biblical parable of suffering, exoneration, and ultimate deliverance, he suggests that the nation's destiny is intricately entwined with a redemption of its African American population. More directly than The Bluest Eye, his address interweaves a note of national reaffirmation with a critique of the nation's failure.

In Paradise Morrison does not assume the position of a black outsider criticizing a predominantly white exceptianalist America for excluding her. That is, she does not maintain an exceptionalist ethos in the universalist way of implying that, if only African Americans were allowed full and equal participation in the American nation, the nation would indeed be in a position to redeem its paradisiacal promise. Rather, taking as her starting point the idea that the African American community lives its own version of the exceptionalist narrative, she explores its function within this community. In this respect, she may be understood in relation to Eddie S. Glaude's study of the rhetoric used by African Americans in their nation-building efforts during the nineteenth century. Addressing the problem raised by Harding and Raboteau, Glaude emphasizes the centrality of "the Exodus story," as he calls it:

This contradiction [i.e., the one identified by Harding and Raboteau] does not diminish the fact that the story of Exodus is, in some respects, a national history. Exodus remains the story and history of a people. Its analogical application within the context of African-American politics in the nineteenth century (as in its use among white men in the early republic) amounts to nation building, the construction of a corporate identity distinct from yet implicated in broader conceptions of American identity. (119)