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8 If I’d a Knowed More, I Would a Loved More Toni Morrison’s Love and Spiritual Authorship The love we had stays on my mind. —The Dells In her 1993 Nobel Prize for literature lecture, Toni Morrison describes prominent features of the African’s encounter in America, lamenting over such disquieting conditions as their not having had a home in this place, the historical occurrence of being “set adrift from the one(s) you knew,” and the social situation of being placed “at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company” (28–29). Morrison’s unwillingness to surrender commentary concerning the defining attributes of the African American experience recorded in her novels is commendable, and the inexorable references to historical, spiritual, and cultural modes of resistance complements her narrative integrity.1 With honest courage and commitment to document spiritual traditions of displaced African people through her verbal figurations , Morrison has honored the living memory of Africa and has helped to transform fiction from a site of terror to a place of spiritual power.2 By their having taken up residence in the spiritual spaces and cultivating identities “separate” from the Europeans and within the cultural milieu of Africa, African people have challenged the value of whiteness and subverted the intentions of legal separation, which was to deny them access to that perceived space of privilege. The novels examined in this study, when considered collectively represent traditions inspired by a shared spiritual memory. Using narratives that speak of displacement and the renewal of hope, Morrison points to the possibilities for wholeness through the interplay between the individual and community. Additionally, employing ritual that provides rehabilitation of the soul, she awakens the sleeping giants of myth, and allows silences to be disturbed through the montage of spiritual and cultural events. In Shadow and Act, Ralph Ellison comments that “myth and ritual are used in literature to give form and significance to the material” as they are true portraits of how peo- 190 k Chapter 8 ple function in everyday life (174). Similarly, Frantz Fanon explains the way in which a people remove the yoke of cultural estrangement and negation, stating, “The nation gathers together the various indispensable elements necessary for the creation of a culture, those elements which alone can give it credibility, validity, life, and creative power” (245). Language is decidedly one of the “indispensable elements” to which Fanon makes reference. As a major cultural dynamic, language continues to occupy a space of ultimate importance. For example, Morrison begins her eighth novel, Love (2003), with the voice of “L,” one of the omniscient narrators, lamenting about the injudicious use of language. L exclaims, “Nowadays silence is looked on as odd and most of my race has forgotten the beauty of meaning much by saying little” (3).3 In her protracted remarks, she chides folks for their lack of discretion. That tongues let loose “work all by themselves with no help from the mind” (3) is not an inconsequential concern. L surmises that the potency and potential of language to “stop a womb or a knife” has been dispirited primarily because of the lack of restraint. L cannot sanction this imprudent use of Nommo. Janheinz Jahn defines Nommo as “The driving power that gives life and efficacy to all things” and “the physical-spiritual life force which awakens all sleeping forces and guides physical and spiritual life”; its misuse is inexcusable (101). In her earlier novels Morrison establishes the exclusivity of black language. It exists in the trespass of language, such as Hannah’s questioning of Eva’s maternal affection in Sula or in the privileged language of “grown folk” in The Bluest Eye when Claudia says, “We do not, cannot know the meanings of all their words, for we are nine and ten years old. So we watch their faces, their hands, their feet, and listen for truth in timbre” (17). It is also located in the words of Baby Suggs that heal African folk in the clearing, which capture the essence of asé to heal the people who have just crossed over the threshold of enslavement in Beloved. The shape and content of the spoken word have power. The spoken word can also be deprived of authority illustrated by Baby Suggs’s words, “And no, they ain’t in love with your mouth. . . . What you say out of it they will not heed. What you scream from it they do not hear” (Beloved 88). African people have...

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