Toni Morrison and the Idea of Africa (review)

Toni Morrison, in a 1998 interview with Carolyn Denard, describes the American South as a site of modernity for enslaved African Americans, insisting that "out of thrown things they invented everything."¹ She further asserts, "no one gives us credit for the intelligence it takes to be forced into another culture, be oppressed, and make a third thing" (p. 14). La Vinia Delois Jennings, in Toni Morrison and the Idea of Africa, exposes the cultural history that created, in part, "this wholly modern thing" (Morrison, p. 15). Through meticulous research, Jennings explicates the resonances of West and Central African worldviews in African American culture and specifically in Morrison's fiction.

Divided into six chapters, Toni Morrison and the Idea of Africa examines African epistemologies, religions, and philosophies that survived the transatlantic voyage. After a general introduction, chapter two provides historical background on the West African cross and circle cosmogram and argues that the symbol substructures Morrison's "natural landscapes, bodyscapes and interior spaces" (p. 21). Jennings discloses that the quartered circle is imprinted, for example, on the body of Sethe's mother in Beloved and informs the physical geography of Sula. Chapter three offers a compelling reading of the witch figure and the contested concept of evil in Sula, Beloved, and Paradise. Chapters four and five turn to much-addressed aspects of Morrison's work—ancestors and conjurers—and place them in a detailed historical context. Particularly insightful here is Jennings's discussion of time in Morrison's fiction as being in concert with a traditional African perception of the infinite past, as opposed to a Western conceptualization of a boundless future.

Complementing Jennings's rich presentation of African cosmology, there are some nice rhetorical moments in the text. In her chapter on witches, she interweaves a story of her Great-Aunt Coot, a woman who resembled Sula and was rumored to be a practitioner of hoodoo. This gesture fuses the academic to the personal and reveals Jennings's intimate connection to the author's literary landscape. Further, the attention given to Paradise is important since there has been scant scholarship on this recent novel.

At other times, however, Jennings seems more interested in presenting her research on African culture than explicating Morrison's fiction. For example, she offers an elaborate discussion of the taxonomy of African progenitors—living-dead ancestors and living elders—despite the fact that it does not directly illumine Morrison's work. As Jennings herself concedes, Morrison routinely elides these ancestral figures. While instructive, such detours do not directly further Morrison scholarship. Regardless, the book charts plentiful new ground in Morrison studies.

Most importantly, Toni Morrison and the Idea of Africa makes a significant contribution to the growing body of research on the African Diaspora. Indeed, Jennings's conclusion, "Identifiable Blackness," briefly mentions other works of fiction—Charles Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman, Zora Neale Hurston's Dust Tracks on a Road, and Henry Dumas's Ark of Bones and Other Stories—to reveal the African palimpsest underlying the African American literary tradition. There is no break in oceanic waters; the transatlantic connections exist, and Jennings's excavation of the latent West and Central African religious symbols and philosophies in Morrison's fiction is a strong testament to the persistence of African cosmology as a shaping force in African American culture and artistry.