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CHAPTER THREE: Keeping It in the Family: Passing on Racial Memory in the Novels of Toni Morrison
- State University of New York Press
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Jazz always keeps you on edge. There is no final chord. There may be a long chord, but no final chord. And it agitates you. . . . [Jazz musicians] have the ability to make you want [more], and to remember the want. That is a part of what I want to put in my books. They will never fully satisfy—never fully. —Toni Morrison, qtd. in McKay In addition to having to use their heads to get ahead, they had the weight of the whole race sitting there. You needed two heads for that. —Toni Morrison, Beloved But who misleads my voice? Who grates my voice? Stuffing my throat with a thousand bamboo fangs? —Aimé Césaire, “Notebook of a Return to the Native Land”1 Toni Morrison suggests that her determination to make her readers “remember the want” is part of what defines her writing as black. Although some degree of working through takes place within her novels, enabling individuals to come to terms with their personal histories, a racial memory of an “ungovernable” loss (122) prevents her novels from offering closure.Throughout her work, and especially in Beloved, the weighty memory of an injustice CHAPTER THREE Keeping It in the Family Passing on Racial Memory in the Novels of Toni Morrison 79 SP_DUR_079-110 10/30/03 1:39 PM Page 79 done to the whole race constitutes a physical impediment to mourning, a memory of a violence done to the black body that, as in Césaire’s tortured manifesto of black consciousness, functions as a speech impediment, blocking the process of verbalization and mourning. If Morrison’s novels function on one level as the narrativization of African American experience, as a form of cultural memory, on another level they encounter the materiality of racial memory.2 In order to understand the role of remembrance in Beloved, it is necessary to draw this distinction between a cultural memory that comprises the verbal—both written and oral, official and unofficial—accounts of a community’s history, and a racial memory that remains nonverbalized yet somehow passes itself on from generation to generation, as if it were secretly encrypted within the cultural text. Because the “weight of the whole race” cannot be accommodated within consciousness , it passes itself on from generation to generation as symptom or affect. It passes itself on as a memory of the body, a memory of the violence inflicted on the racially marked body, that is also a bodily memory, a memory that takes on a bodily form precisely because it exceeds both the individual’s and the community ’s capacity for verbalization and mourning. This distinction between cultural and racial memory disturbs the utopian symmetry of multiculturalist discourses in which every citizen can lay claim to a distinct “ethnic” identity grounded in a particular cultural history. The term “ethnicity” is often preferred over the term “race” because it emphasizes cultural over biological inheritance.3 But this preference often amounts to a disavowal of the reality of racism and leads to the impression that we are all equally “ethnic.” It denies the fact that “consciousness of the body is solely a negating activity” (Fanon 110) for the nonwhite subject. As Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks has argued, whites do not undergo the same negation as nonwhites because whiteness functions as a naturalized sign of the human, as a nonsignifier of race. While all subjects are in possession of a cultural memory , only the racially marked are truly in possession of a racial memory, of what amounts to an inherited memory of collective negation.4 While cultural memory can be assimilated into the individual consciousness as a complement to the individual’s sense of identity, racial memory threatens to destroy this sense of identity by dissolving the individual within a collective experience of negation. Cultural memory is a “healthy” mode of remembrance, a mode of commemoration that is essentially self-centered in that it is a way of claiming the dead, of claiming one’s ancestry, in order to shore up one’s identity in the present. Racial memory, by contrast, is “unhealthy” insofar as it is a melancholic identification with the dead, a lifethreatening , other-centered mode of being claimed by the dead, a mode of being-for-death. Like the melancholia of Friday and Michael K, racial memory is a way of identifying with the way in which one’s ancestors have been Postcolonial Narrative and the Work of Mourning 80 [44.202.183.118] Project MUSE (2024...