Revolutionary Suicide in Toni Morrison's Fiction - Critical Essay

African American Review, Fall, 2000 by Katy Ryan

Those who find the ending an abdication of the necessity not only of telling the story but also of intervening in the continuing story of colonial violence probably have little interest in thinking about suicide as a resistant strategy, much less as a form of survival. Mae Henderson offers an interpretation closer to my own. She emphasizes that this is not a story to be "PASSED ON--not in the sense of being retold, but in the sense of being forgotten, repressed, or ignored" (83). In this reading, the text affirms its own life and insists on active remembrance. Acts of self-destruction in Morrison's novels occupy (like Levinas's face) a penultimate position, coming (again) just before the end of the story.

Speaking of Race and Suicide

In a conversation with Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith describes how, in a white supremacist culture, actions and concepts that have nothing to do with race become imbued with racial meanings:

Therefore, Black people have the option of taking things--sexuality, behavior, conflicts, whatever they don't like--and saying, "That's white." Lesbianism is not the only thing seen as a white thing. A real good example is suicide. Black people say, "Yeah, suicide is a white thing." (124) [6]

Barbara Christian speculates in "Layered Rhythms" about Morrison's interest in Woolf in the 1950s:" ... what did you want with the work of a woman who killed herself. You know the way black people feel about suicide. As your narrator commented in your novel Sula, the black people of the Bottom feel that suicide is 'beneath them'" (489). Kevin Early's 1992 empirical research documents a similar disassociation; in interviews, pastors in a Southern black community expressed "a deep sense of the incompatibility of suicide with the black experience" (25). Resistance to the word suicide generally proceeds from a reluctance to identify oneself or one's community with victimization, powerlessness, hopelessness. Sometimes suicide does signify precisely these realities; it can also indict a brutal, dehumanizing culture that makes life unbearable. Suicide is now the third leading cause of death among young black men; it is eighth in the nation overall. [7]

In 1965, Huey Newton cofounded the Black Panther Party with Bobby Seale. (Brown took over the leadership in 1974, becoming the first woman to lead a paramilitary operation in the United States.) Newton's 1972 collection of essays To Die for the People, which was edited by Morrison, explains his commitment to the Panthers and to armed struggle against white supremacy. In Revolutionary Suicide (1973). Newton rethinks suicide in political terms: "If the Black Panthers symbolize the suicidal trend among Blacks, then the whole Third World is suicidal, because the Third World fully intends to resist and overcome the ruling class of the United States" (5). Newton reflects on the theoretical intersection between suicide and revolution, playing off the ideas of Emile Durkheim and Herbert Hendin. While in prison, Newton read Durkheim's sociological analysis and learned about Hendin's research in the May 1970 issue of Ebony. In Black Suicide (1969), Hendin argued that suicide rates among black people in urban areas are often as high as those of whites and that the white rate only surpasses the black rate after age 45 (6). Black men in New York City between the ages of 20 and 35 kill themselves twice as often as do white men in the same age group (3), and among young black women suicide is "decidedly more of a problem than it is in the white population of the same age" (5). Hendin's research led Newton to think about the cultural implications of suicide and to wonder if the hopelessness that many young black people experience could be directed away from "reactionary suicide" and into "revolutionary suicide."