Re-imagining agency: Toni Morrison's Paradise

African American Review, Winter, 2002 by Magali Cornier Michael

With an eye to such other traditions of coalition, Morrison's Paradise depicts women characters acting collaboratively on the basis of particular, temporary, intersecting subject positions connected to a common history of oppression in order to resist and/or move beyond specific forms of injustices perpetrated by an exploitative racist and sexist American culture. Morrison's text constructs women characters who are enabled through active acknowledgments of the subject positions they share, but without ignoring those they do not share. As a result, these characters can move beyond certain oppressive subject positions to create new, more liberating and active (although always unstable) subject positions as well as (temporary) grounds for agency. Although these coalitions are local and temporary, they nevertheless lead to concrete acts that affect the characters' material, lived existence. A form of collective agency thus results that depends on neither fixed subjectivity, nor hierarchical structures, nor totali zing meta-narratives.

Indeed, the novel offers figurations of women with different pasts, races, classes, and ages actively constructing communal spaces and identities (even if they are temporary and unstable) that allow them not only to survive (at least temporarily) in the face of injustices but also to reach toward a new, alternative, non-hierarchical sense of justice that emphasizes both equality and nurturing. Identity and agency are reconfigured as decentered, multivocal, and always in-process but, nevertheless, as constructive. Morrison's Paradise thus re-imagines the bases from which coalitions are formed in ways that highlight the importance of coalition building in terms of a non-hierarchically based form of justice, while nevertheless retaining sight and sites of differences. Coalitions remain neither static nor unproblematic in Morrison's text, in the sense that they are presented as dynamic, ever-changing processes that must perpetually negotiate the "differences" between its actors or participants but that, at the s ame time, result in at least temporary physical and/or psychic survival for some of the women characters. In a utopian gesture, Paradise thus depicts an alternative community of women actualized through coalition processes; at the same time, however, the novel examines the ways in which this group of women threatens the dominant societal structures that remain patriarchal and hierarchical. Moreover, Morrison's novel questions rigid separatism as ultimately destructive of coalitions that depend on forms of justice which remain grounded in inequitable power relations, particularly if the separatism functions on a patriarchal, hierarchical model; however, the text also explores the possibilities and even necessity of temporary forms of separatism in the formation of coalitions.

Paradise explicitly foregrounds its engagement with issues of coalition by weaving the Civil Rights Movement into its text through its presentation of the character of Reverend Misner. A relatively recent arrival in the town of Ruby and thus not a descendent of the original town founders, Misner attempts to raise the consciousness of the young people to a national movement in the face of their fathers and grandfathers, who established first Haven and then Ruby on racist, separatist grounds and who strive to protect this separatism at all costs. As a case in point, Stewart Morgan, one of the twins who function as the present-generation senior patriarchs, had "outspoken contempt for the schoolchildren sitting in that drugstore in Oklahoma City," wrote "a hateful letter to the women who organized the students," and "called Thurgood Marshall a 'stir-up' Negro." (82). Men like Stewart are deeply suspicious of Misner, whose past experience "floated behind him" in hints of "covert meetings to stir folks up[,] confro ntations with rather than end runs around white law," and who thus "could encourage strange behavior" (56). Morrison's text thus approaches the issue of coalition and the Civil Rights Movement by focusing on the splits, the racism, and the patriarchal structures within the African-American community itself.