"As if word magic had anything to do with the courage it took to be a man": black masculinity in Toni Morrison's Paradise

African American Review, Winter, 2005 by Andrew Read

Toni Morrison's novel Paradise combines an innovative intervention in debates over the representation of black men with a critique of traditional Western notions of masculinity. In representing the struggles of African American men to articulate their masculinity under extreme pressure, the novel also enacts Morrison's own struggle to articulate black masculinity in ways that reveal problems of patriarchal concepts of manhood without reproducing racist stereotypes. By depicting black men committing brutal violence against defenseless women, Paradise inevitably enters into current controversies over cultural representations of African American men. However, although Paradise engages with many of the stereotypes of black masculinity that are central to this controversy, regarding criminality, misogyny, and violence, Morrison departs radically from the explanations for these problems that structure dominant racial discourse. By locating these men in an overwhelmingly patriarchal community, Morrison contests the idea that black male violence stems from a dysfunctional African American matriarchal society. This concept was most notoriously and explicitly articulated in the Moynihan Report, which was largely condemned and rejected when it appeared in the 1960s. However, as Marcellus Blount and George P. Cunningham observe in their introduction to Representing Black Men, giving the example of a 1993 Newsweek article that traced the problems of African American society to the failure of black fathers to fulfill conventional patriarchal roles, this report's "normative premises and prescriptions have insinuated themselves in contemporary racial discourse" (xi). Morrison subverts these premises and prescriptions by representing her town's official history as dominated by individuals with names like "Big Papa" and "Big Daddy," and by two entire generations of men known as the "Old Fathers" and the "New Fathers." Almost every family in her mythical Ruby is controlled by a powerful father figure, and these men also possess hegemonic authority in the public sphere.

Even as she undermines one stereotype of black masculinity in this novel however, Morrison may appear to endorse another. The criticisms of some reviewers suggest Paradise is vulnerable to the accusations of stereotyping black men as naturally, irredeemably sexist and violently domineering, accusations often leveled at recent African American women's fiction. In her tellingly titled New York Times review, "Worthy Women, Unredeemable Men," Michiko Kakutani accused Paradise of representing men as "two-dimensional cliche[s] ... uniformly control freaks or hotheads, eager to dismiss independent women as sluts or witches, and determined to make everyone submit to their will" (2). Accusations that Morrison stereotypes black men in this way might be contested through reference to the behavior of the female characters in Paradise, a number of whom demonize and even attack stigmatized Others as do the men characters. After Sweetie Fleetwood flees to the Convent to escape the arduous task of caring for her sick children, she calls the women living there "demons," and later claims they forced her to go there (130). Similarly, Arnette Fleetwood attacks the Convent Women and blames them for the death of the baby that she herself injured through attempts to force a miscarriage (250, 179-80). However, here I argue that Morrison is focusing centrally on a black male problem in Paradise, but she is not condemning black men or implying that their negative characteristics are somehow fixed, naturally determined by their race and gender. Instead, Paradise exposes pervasive problems inherent in Western social ideals of masculinity, which impact upon African American men with particular force for historical reasons. She represents black masculinity as a discursive construct, continually shaped and reshaped by the influence of hegemonic American ideologies of manhood, the cultural heritage of African American history, and the traumatic psychical consequences of race oppression.

Central to Western notions of masculinity is the transmission of authority, social identity, and cultural heritage from father to son. Morrison's previous novels have attested to the difficulties and disruptions that plague this process among African Americans. She depicts how slavery and subsequent racist social structures have stripped black men of paternal authority and ensured that they have not a proud cultural heritage but an unresolved and often inarticulable history of trauma and suffering to pass on. (1) As David Marriott has written, in African American cultures, "racism is passed on from father to son like an unwitting curse: a bitterness buried yet operative between them, inhabiting the son (though he doesn't know it), a fault line of self and identity" (96). African American patrimony has often been the transmission of an internalized, dehumanizing racist gaze that splits and traumatizes filial subjectivity. Initially, the men in Paradise appear to have escaped this inheritance by establishing an autonomous, all-black community, one free from the dominating social influences of white racism. They possess a proud cultural heritage that they transmit through the generations as a central element of their children's upbringing. However, aspects of the novel such as the sterility of Steward and Dovey Morgan's marriage and the "damaged" Fleetwood children are obvious metaphors for a serious dysfunction within this process. (2) The men of Ruby actually pass on an unresolved trauma, an experience of dehumanizing shame that their stories of heroic achievement deny rather than work through and overcome. To return to David Marriott's terms, the "bitterness," the "unwitting curse" of racism is being secretly transmitted through the generations in Ruby, as powerfully and as damagingly as in normative African American cultural situations. This process has its roots in the origins of this community, and the reaction of the Old Fathers to an experience they remember as "The Disallowing." The profound, enduring ramifications of this rejection from Fairly, an already established all black town in the Oklahoma Territory, initially seem difficult to explain; the Disallowing involved no violence or direct, explicit insult. (3) As I will demonstrate, however, it was an intolerable experience for the men in this group because it profoundly challenged their concept of what it means to be a man, a concept grounded in white American ideals of masculinity.