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. 13 In a soci-ety with a history of trying to accommodate both slavery and freedom,and a present that wishes both to deny and exploit the pervasiveness ofracism, literacy is also decoding the racial symbolic. Black people as agroup are used to signify the polar opposites of love and repulsion.Onthe one hand, they signify benevolence, harmless and servile guardian-ship, and endless love.On the other hand they represent insanity, illicitsexuality, and chaos. Thus, the exorcism of critical national issues is 188 Morrison and Prophecy situated in the miasma of black life and inscribed on the bodies of blackpeople. 14 By using black bodies in official stories, whites forge a na-tional culture. It is Birth of a Nation writ large menacingly and point-edly for the hood. 15Standing in that social place, she questions the civil rights projectand its national frame. Deep within the word American is its associa-tion with race.To identify someone as South African is to say very little;we need the adjective white or black or colored to make our mean-ing clear, while American means white. 16 In a 1988 interview, PaulGilroy notes her consistent refusal to identify herself as an American : My childhood efforts to join America were continually rebuffed.America has always meant something other to me them. 17 DespiteClarence Thomas s claim that the integration project presumed blackinferiority, she portrays him as Friday in Daniel Defoe s Robinson Crusoe:Each renounces his culture of origin to accept rescue by another; es-caping from a culture experienced as life-threatening, each denies thatit also loved and protected him.Sometimes it is easier, emotionally andprofessionally, to deny, ignore, erase, even destroy one s culture than toendure ambivalence.But if the language of one s culture is lost or sur-rendered, one must describe it in the language of the rescuing one. To lose the mother tongue is to internalize a master s tongue thatdemeans one s origins.18Morrison situates Thomas in a geography of two nations with differ-ent languages, one a clearly bounded colony ruled by another whosepower can (by language) be taken inside.The colony is not unitary;indeed, her essays and fiction emphasize division by gender and class,not to mention the actuality of plurality.Still, essays and interviews in the1980s depict black society as a tribe and village, figures of gemein-schaft that submerge division in a rhetoric of community, if not homo-geneity.These metaphors perform crucial work as she tells a story abouta community thrown into crisis when it undergoes a migration from village values and solidarity to the city. In this jeremiad, traditionalforms of solidarity are jeopardized because my people, we peasants,have come to the city, that is to say, we live within its values.There is aconfrontation between the old values of the tribe, and the new urbanvalues. 19 Cornel West too argues that our black foremothers and fore-fathers created powerful buffers and cultural armor to beat backthe demons of hopelessness, meaninglessness, and lovelessness, but theforms that once sustained black life in America are no longer able tofend off the nihilistic threat. 20 Morrison and Prophecy 189Because preliterate cultural forms are failing as rituals of solidarityand healing, other forms must be devised. For a long time the art formthat was healing for Black people was music. Now that it is no longerexclusively ours because of mass culture, another form has to take thatplace, and it seems to me that the novel is needed by us now in a way thatit was not needed before. 21 Seeking a mode to do what the music didfor blacks, what we used to be able to do with each other in private andin that civilization.underneath the white civilization, Morrison writes what I have recently begun to call village literature, fiction that is reallyfor the village, for the tribe.Peasant literature for my people. 22Morrison thus attacks theories that deconstruct race:Suddenly. race does not exist.For three hundred years black Americansinsisted that race was no usefully distinguishing factor in human relationships.During those three hundred years every academic discipline.insisted race was the determining factor in human development.When blacks discoveredthey had shaped or become a culturally formed race, and that it had specificand revered difference, suddenly they were told there is no such thing as race, biological or cultural, that matters, and that genuine intellectual exchange can-not accommodate it.23Refusing the skeptical move that denies the truth of race, she insteaddepicts a community of interlocutors who refigure its meaning.Insistingon the reality of Afro-American culture, she asserts, We have alwaysbeen imagining ourselves.We are the subjects of our own narrative,witnesses to and participants in our own experiences, and, in no waycoincidentally, in the experience of those with whom we have come incontact. 24Thus, in Afro-American literature itself the question of difference,of essence, is critical. The key is language: The most valuable pointof entry into the question of cultural (or racial) distinction, the onemost fraught, is its language its unpoliced, seditious, confrontational,manipulative, disruptive, masked and unmasking language. 25 Readingrace as cultural, Morrison defines difference aesthetically.She claimsrepeatedly that a black aesthetic guides her writing; she is trying to develop a way of writing that is irrevocably black.not because I was,or because of its subject matter. It would be linked to the sentences, thestructure, texture, and tone. 26Her parallel is always the music, because all the strategies of the artare there, but the music bears broader oral traditions whose improvisa-tional and participatory features she would translate into print. 27 Herlanguage must provide spaces and places so readers can work with 190 Morrison and Prophecythe author in the construction of the book. 28 Accordingly, my compactwith the reader is not to reveal an already established reality [we] agreeon beforehand
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