Matters of colour

Teacher, editor, writer, winner of innumerable awards and honours, including the Nobel Prize and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Toni Morrison is very clear about her identity as an African American writer. However, she adds, “Writers write out of where they come from. It just happens that the space for me is African American.” Perhaps this is why she insists that she does not want to be judged, as African American writers often are, by looking only at the political and ignoring the aesthetic in her work. She believes in fidelity to her own sensibility which, according to her, is “highly political and passionately aesthetic”. This sensibility has informed all her work and given her novels both power and intensity.

The Nobel Prize citation spoke of her as giving “life to an essentially American reality”. In God Help the Child , her eleventh, most recent and first contemporary novel, it is once again this reality, the African American experience, which she deals with, going directly to the central issue of that experience, the matter of colour. In the very first lines, a mother says that her newborn, “was so black she scared me”. (There are many words used for the colour of the skin through the novel: midnight black, Sudanese black, blue black, licorice skin, obsidian midnight skin.) Her blackness makes her light-coloured mother regard Lula Mae Bridewell with such repulsion that she can’t bear to touch her, something the child becomes aware of. Rejection drives Lula Mae into transforming herself, first into Ann Bride, then into just Bride, an extremely successful career woman, working for a cosmetic company. With the help of a “total personal designer”, she also makes herself over into a very beautiful woman. It helps that times have changed since Bride’s childhood; black is now trendily beautiful.

But colour, for Morrison, is only the peg on which to hang the issue of cruelty to children. Ironically, it is Bride’s unloving mother, who insists her daughter call her ‘Sweetness’ to avoid being identified as the mother of such a dark child, who says: What you do to a child matters. In this novel, this issue is more important, actually, than colour. God Help the Child is replete with child victims, not only Bride, but worse victims like her lover Booker’s brother, Adam, abused and murdered by a child abuser; Rain, the child, whom Bride comes across in the course of her search for her lover Booker; and the school children abused by teachers, one of whom, Sofia Huxley, was convicted on Bride’s identification. This becomes a problem for the reader — there are so many victims that the edge of the knife used to expose the cruelty becomes blunted. And Bride’s regression into childhood (her bodily hair, her periods and then her breasts disappear) when Booker leaves her, seems neither magic nor fantasy, just a hiccup, both to Bride herself, as well as to the reader.

God Help the Child is written in small chapters, each chapter devoted to a character. Yet no character, not even Bride, comes wholly alive. We have no clue to the flight path of one who fought rejection to become a success, to the courage and strength that helped her to do this. Bride is all surface and glitter, she seems less a winner than a whiner, in spite of her Louis Vuitton bag, her Jaguar, her expensive clothes. In fact Booker and his family are more real, Booker’s adoration of, and his grief over his dead older brother, Adam, more poignant. The words that describe his last sight of Adam are beautifully evocative and have all the lyricism Morrison’s writing is known for.

Morrison has once said that “the writer must practice thrift, there must be a sense of holding back”. Unfortunately, there seems to be no holding back in this novel. Everything is explained, all is explicit. And ironically, for that very reason, the characters seem sketchy, without any depths. The magic of novels like Beloved and Sula is missing.

However, what really matters about this novel is that, even in a world which has seen Obama as President, and women like Condoleeza Rice and Oprah Winfrey in powerful positions, Morrison shows that colour still matters. The killings of unarmed black men and boys by policemen in the US and the resulting anger spilling over into rioting, have highlighted this. In fact, Morrison, in a recent interview, said, “Is it over? I will say it is over when a cop shoots an unarmed white teenager, when a white man is convicted of raping a black woman.” We need to have a conversation about race, she says in the same interview.

In God Help the Child , Morrison is continuing the conversation she began when she started writing her first novel, The Bluest Eye .

Shashi Deshpandeis an author and critic based in Bengaluru

COMMENT NOW