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  • Toni Morrison and the Idea of Africa
  • Stella Bolaki (bio)
Toni Morrison and the Idea of Africa. La Vinia Delois Jennings. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 260 pages. $100.00 cloth; $35.99 paper.

La Vinia Delois Jennings's Toni Morrison and the Idea of Africa is a lucid and thoroughly researched academic investigation of "the African palimpsest" (5) underlying Morrison's fiction and African American literature and culture. On one level, this is a project of recuperation intended to uncover what the Middle Passage and American slavery suppressed and erased—as Jennings puts it, "to dust off the survivals of West and Central African traditional civilizations that Christianity obscures in the Western hemisphere" (2). On another level, Jennings's meticulous excavation of and close attention to the resonances of West and Central African traditional cosmologies in Morrison's novels seeks to counter the "generalized discussions . . . of things African" in the Western academy through Jennings's attempt to "(re)claim the particulars, to dust off the critical palimpsest as well" (14). [End Page 203]

Rather than reading Morrison's characters through the interpretative lens of Western civilization, Jennings analyzes them through "the socio-religious directives of the cross within the circle" (3), namely Kongo's geometric "Yowa": the most discernible African symbol in the Americas, which repeatedly appears as "a substructural signifier marking landscapes, bodyscapes, and interior spaces" in Morrison's fiction (20). Jennings is careful not to essentialize or exoticize "blackness" through her endeavor to uncover its identifiable qualities in Morrison's novels. She makes a point of allying with those critics and historiographers who have argued against "a monolithic 'African worldview'" but finds that "a collective concept is not impractical in relation to African American history because of the intermingling of cultures from West and Central Africa during the slave trade" (1). Her methodology, "moving backward in time and space" (14) and shedding light on the different amalgamations, migrations, and creolizations of African traditional beliefs, does justice, most of the time, to the complexity of the histories she traces. A more ambitious, though not always substantiated, argument is Jennings's suggestion in her introduction that Morrison's grounding of her work in African traditions transcends the "metaphorical"; rather than merely offering "a mythic substructure," as in James Joyce's Ulysses, the "African presences" in her work are "implemented as real and discernible presences in African-American life and culture" (5). This is the reason why, when Jennings examines the concept of moral evil in Morrison's work (Chapter Three), for instance, she tentatively suggests that an Africanist understanding of such a concept can illuminate "African Americans' disparate way of knowing, being, and mediating social conflicts and roles" (79).

After her introductory chapter, in which she acknowledges work by scholars whose philosophical, historical, ethnographic, cultural, and anthropological work she extends, Jennings turns in Chapter Two to a broader discussion of the cross and circle cosmogram that structures many aspects of Morrison's work. The following three chapters focus on "bandoki" (witches), "kanda" (juniors, living elders, and ancestors), and "banganga" (specialists), chosen for being "the most historically resilient West and Central African traditional socioreligious roles that appear as major cultural features of Morrison's literary aesthetic" (6). While the taxonomies and wealth of information offered by Jennings might initially be too much to take in, especially when some of the categories in question are elusive in Morrison's fiction, all three chapters demonstrate the author's close reading skills and historical contextualization of aesthetic practices, symbols, social roles, and philosophies. In any case, the structure of the individual chapters (rich detail in the body of each chapter concluded by [End Page 204] a summary of main points) caters to both the specialist and the reader who wishes to acquire an overview of the African palimpsest underlying Morrison's work.

In Chapter Three, investigating the role of witch images in Sula (1974), Beloved (1987), and Paradise (1999), Jennings argues that "understanding West and Central African peoples' uniting of good and evil and the balancing fusion of constituent opposites [in accordance with an African traditional monistic theodicy] is key to unlocking moral meaning throughout Morrison's literary canon" (25...

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