Morrison's Sula - 3

In this context, what do the two main characters – women – do? Is it now a world that will allow them to express themselves, be themselves? Morrison suggests that when stressful shaping factors are turned off they don’t cease to exert influence on their subjects. In the Foreword, Morrison reveals what she was thinking of when she was writing Sula:

'In that atmosphere of “What would you be doing or thinking if there was no gaze or hand to stop you?” I began to think about just what that kind of license would have been like for us black women forty years earlier.'

With nothing to stop her, Eva gets her leg cut for pecuniary reasons and burns her son alive when he becomes a liability. Her daughter, Hannah beds other women’s husbands. Her granddaughter, Sula, watches her mother burn, gets an education, does some traveling, but returns home to break up her best friend’s marriage and institutionalize her grandmother. She is the woman who for society is an “outlaw”, a free woman. In the Foreword, Morrison sets out what she wanted to explore through such a figure.

"Female freedom always means sexual freedom, even when – especially when – it is seen through the prism of economic freedom. The sexual freedom of Hannah Peace was my entrance into the story, constructed from shreds of memory about the way local women regarded a certain kind of female – envy coupled with amused approbation."

Acting as a foil to Sula, the free woman in the novel, is Nel – the wronged wife and the “good woman”. Morrison says, “…Sula, although she does nothing so horrendous as what Eva does, is seen by the townspeople as not just competitive, but devouring, evil. Nel, with the most minimal demands, is seen as the muted standard.”

Speaking to Betty Jean Parker in 1979, Morrison said the two girls were “like a Janus’ head.” She said:

… there was a little bit of both in each of those two women, and that if they had been one person, I suppose they would have been a rather marvelous person. But each one lacked something that the other one had.[1]

The two girls had started from very similar points as 10-year-old girls in the Bottom. There is a “fallen woman” in both their families. Nel’s grandmother was a “Creole whore” and Sula’s mother Hannah “simply refused to live without the attentions of a man, and… had a steady sequence of lovers, mostly the husbands of their friends and neighbors.” Speaking about why Nel had to have a grandmother with “questionable roots” and how that led to what she later becomes, Morrison, speaking to the Massachusetts Review in 1976, said:

"Nel’s grandmother just means that there’s that kind of life from which Nel comes; that’s another woman who was a hustler; that part is already in Nel and accounts for her attraction to Sula….[2]"

Nel and Sula had become friends when they were “unshaped, formless things”. Nel “seemed stronger and more consistent than Sula, who could hardly be counted on to sustain any emotion for more than three minutes.” The fact is both girls are passive, rendered so by parental words and attitudes. There is a degree of powerlessness in their lives. Sula is sent “flying up the stairs” by her mother’s words, “…I love Sula. I just don’t like her.” And Nel’s parents “had succeeded in rubbing down to a dull glow any sparkle or splutter she had…. During all of her girlhood the only respite Nel had had from her stern and undemonstrative parents was Sula.” The two children first meet in their dreams.

"…they had already made each other’s acquaintance in the delirium of their noon dreams. They were solitary little girls whose loneliness was so profound it intoxicated them and sent them stumbling into Technicolored visions that always included a presence, a someone, who, quite like the dreamer, shared the delight of the dream... Nel … fell easily into a picture of herself lying on a flowered bed, tangled in her own hair, waiting for some fiery prince. He approached but never quite arrived. But always, watching the dream along with her, were some smiling sympathetic eyes. Someone as interested as she herself in the flow of her imagined hair, the thickness of the mattress of flowers, the voile sleeves that closed below her elbows in gold-threaded cuffs…. Similarly, Sula… spent hours in the attic behind a roll of linoleum galloping through her own mind on a gray-and-white horse tasting sugar and smelling roses in full view of a someone who shared both the taste and the speed."

This passage is reminiscent of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex in “The Young Girl” chapter of which she talks about the passive eroticism and narcissism of young girls who, doomed to immanence, day-dream about a romantic, mysterious male.

[1] From Complexity: Toni Morrison’s Women in Sturdy Black Bridges, Ed. Roseann Bell et al. Garden City: Doubleday, 1979:251-57; In Conversations with Toni Morrison


[2] From Intimate Things in Place: A Conversation with Toni Morrison by Robert Stepto in the Massachusetts Review 18 (1977): 473-89; Conversations with Toni Morrison

Morrison's Sula - 2

"What is friendship between women when unmediated by men? What choices are available to black women outside their own society’s approval?"

These, as Morrison explains in her Foreword, are some of the questions she set out to explore in Sula. The story focuses on Nel and Sula – what stuff they’re made of and what they do with their lives after making each other’s acquaintance in a small, black town in the 1920s, the only children of distant mothers and absent fathers. The context is complex and important, even if at least one of the two girls goes on to transcend her background (in that she goes to college and travels around the country for 10 years). In Morrison’s other novels – The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon and Jazz – part of the context is white violence or at the very least the internalized white gaze. In all these books, there are violent exposures to the white-dominated politics of the day which can surely corrode anyone. In Morrison’s first novel The Bluest Eye, two young girls had exhibited violent reactions against the white “norm” which their friend Pecola Breedlove aspired to. But Sula has more to do with the aftermath of stressful events, the nature of evil, personality and boundaries in relationships. Morrison explores these themes by placing the political question secondary to the “aesthetics only” criterion of merit. She says in the Foreword to the novel:

"In 1970, when I began writing Sula, I had already had the depressing experience of reading commentary on my first novel, The Bluest Eye, by both black and white reviewers that – with two exceptions – had little merit since the evaluation ignored precisely the “aesthetics only” criteria it championed. If the novel was good, it was because it was faithful to a certain kind of politics; if it was bad, it was because it was faithless to them. The judgment was based on whether “Black people are – or are not – like this.” This time out, I returned the compliment and ignored the shallowness of such views and, again, rooted the narrative in a landscape already tainted by the fact that it existed."

The worst is not now. Eva Peace says “Just ‘cause you got it good now you think it was always this good? 1895 was a killer, girl.... Niggers was dying like flies” The characters are living in the aftermath of the time when “Things was bad.” While the characters in Sula are constrained and pained by the larger politics that dominate their lives –

“a neighborhood where on quiet days people in valley houses could hear singing sometimes, banjos sometimes…. A valley man… might see a dark woman in a flowered dress doing a bit of cakewalk… and it would be easy for the valley man to hear the laughter and not notice the adult pain that rested somewhere under the eyelids, somewhere under their head rags and soft felt hats, somewhere in the palm of the hand, somewhere behind the frayed lapels, somewhere in the sinew’s curve....”

unlike Beloved or Song of Solomon where violence from whites wreaks havoc in the lives of the victims and their generations, the white presence in Sula is more thwarting in nature and life-threatening only potentially. Other factors have the upper hand in the residents’ lives.

"The black people… were mightily preoccupied with earthly things – and each other, wondering even as early as 1920 what Shadrack was all about, what that little girl Sula who grew into a woman in their town was all about, and what they themselves were all about, tucked up there in the Bottom."

The characters are also dominated by factors like their innate characteristics, their families and above all their friendships. Morrison creates a world, stressed post-traumatically, where active white violence is not a factor for the main characters – two young women. They experience racial politics twice removed through male characters who abdicate, leave.

As for patriarchy, the homes of the girls are dominated by women. The male gaze comes filtered through other characters. Nel had vowed never to let any man look at her the way the black soldiers looked when her light-skinned mother had ended a humiliating exchange with a white conductor with a coquettish display of pretty teeth. Sula was aware of how a woman like her mother, who managed to get “some touching every day” was perceived “outside the house.”

A Very Mortal Friendship in Morrison's Sula

India is a deeply iniquitous society. Some of our people belong to so called "lower castes" and face discrimination from upper caste folk. Dark-skinned people face discrimination no matter what caste they are. Misogyny has free play in our public and private spaces. Poor people, and we have a third of the world's poor in our country, are on the margins of "mainstream" society. It is the light-skinned, upper caste and upper class male who has the major share of the representation that our popular culture, read Bollywood, so famously churns out. People like myself - a non-Hindu (it doesn't matter that my ancestors from centuries ago were "upper caste"), dark-skinned and middle class female - go largely unrepresented in our art and culture, except in a less-than-flattering light. So when I read someone like Toni Morrison I feel exhilaration! I feel liberated! I feel I'm looking at a mirror where I can see myself and my clan. And that is very useful as I'm sure you'll agree.

In the next few posts I'll be sharing an essay I had written, as an outsider looking into a very American story, on Morrison's novel, Sula. I wrote it last year, partly to clear my own head on issues like female friendship and sexuality, and also as a writing sample to be sent to universities. Although I did not get a place at the university I applied to, they wrote to tell me they liked the essay. I hope you'll like it too.

____________________________________________________________________________


Suddenly Nel stopped. Her eye twitched and burned a little.

“Sula?” she whispered, gazing at the tops of trees. “Sula?”

Leaves stirred; mud shifted; there was the smell of overripe green things. A soft ball of fur broke and scattered like dandelion spores in the breeze.

“All that time, all that time, I thought I was missing Jude.” (pg. 174)

Dedicating her 1973 novel, Sula, to her sons Ford and Slade, Toni Morrison had written, “It is sheer good fortune to miss somebody before they leave you.” This good fortune is denied to the characters of Sula, whose lives are touched, sometimes marred, by the heroine after whom the book is named. Sula’s best friend, Nel, experiences the epiphanic moment described in the last page of the novel and quoted above, 25 years after Sula’s death. The moment also comes 45 years after Nel first befriends Sula. Forty-five years in which a young child had lost his life in their play. Years in which, the “stronger”, Nel, had been “selected” away by marriage, on the day of which Sula leaves town, only to return 10 years later to sleep with Nel’s husband, thus breaking the marriage up. In the culture I come from, this is more than what would usually happen between girlfriends. But girlfriends who form a bond of love, possessiveness and rivalry, one that is sisterly, not lesbian, and is ultimately more precious than the friendship of men… that is known to me. 

It is not uncommon for daughters even in modern cities of India to be sent to all-girls schools, and even colleges. Dominated and ignored at home, many young girls find solace in their female confidants on campus. While their brothers explore the limits of societal norms more freely, girls form bonds of dependence with each other in taking liberties like late-evening movies at busy theatres and dressing in fashion. More rigid taboos associated with discussing sexual fantasies and defying parents in their choice of groom within the arranged-marriage set-up are harder to break. With globalization kicking in, women have become more assertive in terms of the careers they choose, what they do with their paychecks and who they marry. Pre-marital sexual experiments are also not uncommon. Through it all, there is usually a best girlfriend who provides succor. Not surprisingly, there are violent backlashes from men in the form of gang-rapes and other kinds of assaults on women. It is no exaggeration to say that it is a rare man who doesn’t resent his partner’s best female friend and it is usually marriage that breaks up the relationship between the girls. The girls too don’t look back and as years pass spend much of their energies trying to be as desirable for their husbands as when they were on the nuptial night or when they retained some of their individuality during the initial years of marriage. 

It is a rare friendship that survives marriage. A standing joke between my now-married friends and I is that, after marriage a woman loses touch with her friends and a man loses touch with his emotions. The latter part of the joke may or may not be true but the first part may well be. Perhaps we women fear we are less attractive than our best friends, less interesting, and that our men might compare us with the “better” friend. The bond of marriage is still sacrosanct however. Yet, even with little danger of the marriage breaking up – men standing to lose not a little social standing if their wives leave them – women fear being compared. An unattached woman is likely to be disparaged in private and it is no exaggeration to say couples prefer to form bonds of friendship with other couples.

The husband usually actively encourages the distancing of his wife’s friends. A friend of mine, who had an arranged marriage while we were still in our final year of school in 1991, refused to discuss her nuptial night which some of us teenagers were desperate to know about. She said her husband had forbidden her to discuss with us any part of the ceremony except the public bits. Not quite brothers-in-law, husbands of friends need the presence of other men in the equation between their wives and their friends to feel comfortable. It then becomes an extension of the family and women go back to being scrutinized and controlled as they were in their parents’ homes. How good a wife is she, how “undemanding” of her husband, how faithful and how safe a keeper of his honor? It’s a tightrope walk and you better not fall. My former landlady told me how she had, in a fit of anger, once walked out on her “cold” husband only to be lewdly propositioned by her best friend’s husband who said she must be “broadminded” to have taken such a step. My landlady came back home to her husband.

To be continued...

Very, very, dangerous to live even one day...

Virginia Woolf, writing the words quoted in the title of this post, meant something very different to what I was reminded of this evening. I was reminded of my younger self who had her poor heart in her mouth each time she was outdoors alone. Yes, it was very, very dangerous to walk on the streets of Delhi, without an older male beside you.

When I was a teenager, one of the wishes closest to my heart was to be able to walk to my destination (class, church, market or park) alone without having my soul mauled by stares, comments, jostling or even violence. Yes, violence too. I recall one time when a group of boys followed my sister and me as we walked to the local market. Inexplicably, one of them flung a stone at us, which hit me on the back between my shoulder blades. I had mild agoraphobia for years and even today my slouch gets worse when I'm outdoors.

This evening, the daughter of my former classmate (he died of cancer a few years ago) was walking ahead of me, books in hand. A Delhi Transport Corporation bus lurched towards her on a road that was empty as far as my eye could see. I was shocked. The driver, older than her dad would be today, could have run the girl over. She appeared to be lost deep in thought and didn't notice anything amiss, bless her. Reminded of my own fear-filled days, I looked at the driver and he stared right back.

Young women in other cultures can walk about, composing poetry in their heads if they so wish, and no one would molest them. But is the concept of allowing women equal and free access to public spaces alien to this country?

Can I write at all?

A writer I'm reading the the mo, Toni Morrison, reportedly said, "Writing is really a way of thinking - not just feeling but thinking about things that are disparate, unresolved, mysterious, problematic or just sweet." She also said somewhere that she didn't intend to do without that way of thinking.

In my own life, moments when I can articulate my own thoughts are like oases in an arid waste. I've been writing an essay on a novel that I mentioned yesterday, Sula.  And unraveling the structure of the novel, getting inside the skin of the characters, cracking the metaphors - all this has brightened up my days and kept me going this holiday season.

Will there come a time when even this will bore me? I shudder to think....

But the question I'm really thinking of is, "Can I write at all?" Or am I only able to critique someone else's work? Or slightly better, write something inspired by someone else's structure or story? Or at best, write about myself and my fears and my hopes and my dreams....

I feel soon I will have to make the call and give myself that chance. I've been working full-time and writing during long weekends when there isn't any scope for office-work even if people wanted it. But it has been snatched, hurried and botched.

Tomorrow I might post a short story I tried to write in the summer.

Answer to my Prayers

In Toni Morrison's Sula, a little girl, Nel, prays, "I want... I want to be... wonderful. Oh, Jesus make me wonderful." In The Bluest Eye by the same author, a little black girl had prayed for blue eyes. Why do Morrison's characters never have their prayers answered? I'm re-reading some of her books and this question keeps popping into my head.

I too know a thing or two about unanswered prayers. Ten years ago, while studying at film school, I had dedicated myself to God. I prayed and said to God that I wanted to use my talents for His greater glory. I've never made a film since. I also asked for a life partner. I'm still single.

A couple of years ago I spoke about this to a Cor Episcopa (I belong to the Indian Orthodox Church) and he told me, "Cast your net on the other side." Subsequently I've tried to study more, get another job, travel... Stonewalled everywhere.

And yesterday, on Christmas, I was thinking about all this and praying. Then I opened the Bible and found Ezekiel 4:8 before my eyes. "And, behold, I will lay bands upon thee, and thou shalt not turn thee from one side to another, till thou hast ended the days of thy siege." Yes I've read the verse before and there was even a time when I used to wonder if it applied to me. (My mother says when you pray and open the Bible at random you come upon what's in your own heart at that moment.) Yesterday this verse was very far from my mind and I was astonished. 

Before I end I want to add that there was a time when I was unsure if Jesus is merely the Son of God and a very high prophet or if he is God Himself. But you know how faith comes from hearing and hearing from the word of God. I now believe Jesus is King of kings, Lord of lords, Master of masters and the one who is in the midst of the throne and, yet, the one who takes the book out of the right hand of him that sat upon the throne - o mystery - and that this Jesus is God. (Revelations 5:6-7)

Despite the years that have passed in waiting, I'm full of hope. I know that the vision is yet for an appointed time and in the end it will speak....

As I sit down for evening prayer, I ask that tonight, Jesus, you will speak to me. That will be enough for me.

It's Christmas ...

... and I'm lonely! And I wish for an encounter with Jesus himself.

Meanwhile, I'm munching cake and singing along to Fairytale of New York, same as last year. Hope next year will be better.

Jesus, Lord of lords, Master of masters and King of kings, we remember you this day and thank you for meeting our needs. We pray you will look down upon our family and our friends and help them come closer to you.

For we know that every knee shall bow, every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord