Creating the beloved community: religion, race, and nation in Toni Morrison's paradise

African American Review, Fall, 2005 by Channette Romero

In Paradise (1998), the third novel in Toni Morrison's historical trilogy that includes Beloved (1987) and Jazz (1992), Morrison continues to unearth key moments in African American history to explore the complex origins of black identity and community. Like Beloved and Jazz, Paradise invokes and examines traumatic histories. While these earlier texts contain only glimpses of strategies for dealing with painful pasts, Paradise presents a fuller account of healing individual and collective historical trauma. This novel distinguishes itself from the earlier texts in this trilogy by making religion and spirituality central to questions of history. By highlighting the historic importance of Christianity for mainstream American and African American nationhood and community building, Paradise opens up the possibilities it contains for healing the traumas and injustices of this painful history. More than her previous novels, Paradise seems written in response to the failures of the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Nationalist Movement to bring about full equality and social justice for all Americans, what Martin Luther King, Jr., envisioned as the "beloved community."

In Paradise, Morrison uses a multiplicity of religious beliefs to ground a new politics for post-Civil Rights America. The text performs what Stuart Hall has called an "articulation," a contingent connection "between ideology and social forces" that reorganizes elements of cultural practice in a "new discursive formation" that has the power to enact cultural change (Grossberg 142, 143). Hall argues that some contemporary social movements have effectively used religion to construct a useful narrative "to connect the past and the present," to help a people articulate in new ways "where they came from with where they are and where they are going" (Grossberg 143). Paradise attempts to enact a similar cultural transformation by using the religious and spiritual beliefs of black women and men to rearticulate (African) American history and nation building in the hopes that this rethinking of the past opens up the possibility of reimagining the future. The text extends the project begun in Beloved and Jazz of invoking traumatic histories, by using religion and spirituality in innovative ways that attempt to heal the pains of this history. To enact cultural healing, the novel encourages its readers to reimagine more inclusive, accepting communities that disrupt the violent exclusions that characterize both mainstream American and traditional African American conceptions of race, history, and nation.

Paradise does the work of rearticulating African American conceptions of nation building by recounting the violent history of the citizens of Ruby, an all-black town in rural Oklahoma. Ruby is made up of descendents of former slaves who sought to leave behind the racial and economic oppression they experienced during slavery and Reconstruction. The citizens of Ruby guard against further oppression by establishing a rigid, isolationist code of behavior that refuses to allow any new ideas, beliefs, or ethnicities to interfere with their sense of racial pride and community. The male citizens of the town begin to feel threatened by the alternative sense of community offered when a group of women of different economic, ethnic, and racial backgrounds start to gather at a former convent 17 miles outside of Ruby. These women willingly accept into their house individuals who have been marginalized by the rigid code of behavior in Ruby: adulterers, unmarried pregnant women, alcoholics, and women fighting with their husbands or other authority figures in the community. These women also work collectively to heal the violent traumas of their own lives under the instruction of a former Catholic nun, Consolata, a woman who speaks to multiple deities, reads minds, and raises the dead. The town leaders are outraged by the idea that these women live without men or the Christian God in their lives. The novel opens with a group of men from Ruby barging into the convent and killing the women. In the novel's climax, these women, including two who are pronounced dead by multiple witnesses in the text, escape into "another realm," a spiritual door/window in the sky. However, rather than remain in this other realm, several of the women return to try materially to "right the wrongs" of their lives.

Religion and Healing

The accepting, non-institutionalized spirituality that the Convent women practice is juxtaposed in the text with the exclusions of institutionalized religion, particularly Christianity. Paradise suggests that Christianity works to divide individuals from each other and their world. The text is critical of normative Christian traditions for contributing to the subjugation of women. Even though Ruby is a small town, it has three separate Christian churches. Although the text details the various fights and "irreconcilable differences" amongst Ruby's different Christian denominations, what unites them is their misogyny and decision to kill the Convent women (9). Morrison writes, "[M]embers from all of them merged solidly on the necessity of this action. Do what you have to do. Neither the Convent nor the women in it can continue" (9-10). The text makes it clear that gender oppression occurs not just in Ruby's Christian churches but is historically integral to Christianity: in one scene, Gigi, one of the Convent women, discovers the painting of the Roman Catholic Saint Catherine of Siena. The painting depicts a woman on her knees, breasts on a serving platter, with a "knocked-down look," an "I-give-up face" (74). In this worldview, a woman is granted sainthood and considered valuable only if she is completely servile and disowns her sexuality, as symbolized by presenting her breasts on a serving platter.