Revolutionary Suicide in Toni Morrison's Fiction - Critical Essay

African American Review, Fall, 2000 by Katy Ryan

"[On the slaveships, some Igbos] wished to die on the idea that they should then get back to their own country. The captain in order to obviate this idea, thought of an expedient viz. to cut off the heads of those who died intimating to them that if determined to go, they must return without heads. The slaves were accordingly brought up to witness the operation. One of them by violent exertion got loose and flying to the place where the nettings had been unloosed in order to empty the tubs, he darted overboard. The ship brought to, a man was placed in the main chains to catch him which he perceiving, made signs which words cannot express expressive of his happiness in escaping. He then went down and was seen no more." (qtd. in Cowley and Mannix 108)

In this recollection of a 1788 slaveship, Dr. Ecroide Claxton admits the inadequacy of language to convey the escaping man's happiness: He "made signs which words cannot express." Suicide often provokes the rhetorical impasse here encountered; the sign is clear but incommunicable. Claxton cannot translate the joy of the man who, "flying to the place" of escape, found the way out of the horror and defied the captain's command that the Africans remain onboard. During the Middle Passage, some people fought back physically; others survived in more covert ways; still others jumped overboard. On several ships, "there was an epidemic of suicide at the last minute" (Cowley and Mannix 111). [1] Although this leap to freedom, and death, haunts African American literature (Paule Marshall's Brown Girl, Brownstones, James Baldwin's Another Country, Suzan-Lori Parks's The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, Dawn Turner Trice's Only Twice I've Wished for Heaven, Shay Youngblood's Shakin' the Mess Outta M isery), the act of suicide often goes unnamed. And the flying potential of Africans and African Americans as an imagistic and thematic trope has generated far more critical discussion than its metonymic twin, suicide. [2]

Despite the number of self-inflicted deaths in Toni Morrison's novels and the fact that she wrote her master's thesis on alienation and suicide in William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf, there has been little critical attention given to the repetition of self-destruction in her own work. [3] In Beloved (1988), a woman jumps overboard during the Middle Passage; in Jazz (1992), Violet's mother, Rose Dear, climbs into a well, drowning herself in 1892; in Sula (1973), the shell-shocked veteran Shadrack institutes National Suicide Day on 3 January 1920; on the opening page of Song of Solomon (1977), Robert Smith leaps from the top of Mercy Hospital on 18 February 1931; in The Bluest Eye (1970), Pecola Breedlove wills self-disappearance through a longing to possess the eyes of another face ("'Please God . . . Please make me disappear'" [59]). These bodies do not tell a history of capitulation to dominant powers but comprise one part of a larger multivalent narrative of black survival in North America. The act of self -destruction overtly participates in racial and class struggles, revealing, to borrow a phrase from Michel Foucault, "a body totally imprinted by history" (148). [4]

A dual impulse toward erasure and survival, corresponding to the "happiness" of the man who leapt off a ship in 1788, distinguishes Morrison's thematic. In A Taste of Power, Elaine Brown traces the Black Power Movement in the United States to African insurrections and to "the first Africans who had leaped from slave ships in suicidal rejection of slavery" (355). In Morrison's work, suicide operates on two revolutionary levels: Within the story, it functions as a political form of resistance--a break in history--and within the narrative structure, it comprises a discursive strategy, an organizational axis around which meanings revolve--a break in textual time. First, I want to discuss the difficulty of talking about suicide and its ontological relevance to revolutionary struggles. Then, I will turn to Morrison's novels, reading them not according to their publication dates but according to the chronological order of the represented suicides in U.S. American history. I begin with an

extended reading of Beloved , the novel that relies most subtly and structurally on a suicidal movement.

The last chapter of Beloved begins, "There is a loneliness that can be rocked. Arms crossed, knees drawn up; holding, holding on, this motion, unlike a ship's, smooths and contains the rocker" (274). The postbellum narrative returns to the Middle Passage as a negative signifier--the rocking of this loneliness is not like a ship's--and makes a final gesture toward the others: "By and by all trace is gone, and what is forgotten is not only the footprints but the water too and what is down there" (275). "Down there" are millions of Africans killed during the slave trade, including some who chose to jump overboard. In an often overlooked passage in Beloved, a woman "is not pushed" into the sea but chooses to go. The allusion to this suicided other in the final pages of Beloved shifts the narrative into awareness of its own passing, its own inevitable silence: "This is not a story to pass on" (275). The novel, like Levinas's preface to Totality and Infinity, [5] begins to undo itself, to commit a kind of suicide. How one reads the act of self-destruction bears on the interpretation of this ambiguous choral line.