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Chapter Six: Maternal Healing: Reconciliation and Redemption: Jazz, Paradise
- State University of New York Press
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MORRISON’S RENDITIONS OF MOTHERHOOD are truly horrifying: a son burnt to death; a baby whose throat is slit; children who are abused, abandoned, beaten, and neglected by their mothers—these harrowing events permeate all seven of her novels. The last chapter considered how these violations may be read as gestures of nurturance and preservation and, in particular, as maternal acts of resistance against a white supremacist and patriarchal culture. Motherwork, in Morrison’s first five novels, is represented as an act of prevention insofar as mothers , through preservation, nurturance, and cultural bearing, seek to empower children to survive and resist. With her last two novels, Jazz and Paradise, Morrison ’s concern becomes how to heal these wounds once inflicted. Song of Solomon and Tar Baby narrate an individual’s quest to reclaim the ancient properties and ancestral memory of the African American motherline; with Morrison’s last two novels the emphasis is upon the reclamation of the lost selfhood of the unmothered child. This chapter will explore how Violet and Joe in Jazz and the convent women in Paradise are healed when they remember the mother, mourn her loss, reconnect with her, and recreate for themselves an identity as a mothered child. This psychic journey of return, reconnection, and reclamation , while directed to a spirit of a lost mother, is initiated and overseen by an actual mother figure. For Violet this othermother is Alice, while in Paradise, Consolata heals the convent women by prompting them, as did Alice with Violet, to take this journey of rememory and assisting, comforting, and sustaining them as they do so. Healing, in the form of acceptance and forgiveness becomes possible when the women, under the care of Consolata, reclaim their identities as mothers and/or daughter that maternal failures had caused them to deny. As Joe and Violet must go in search of their lost mother to find their lost selves, the convent women must remember the daughters and mothers they once were to become the women they wish to become. 153 chapter six Maternal Healing Reconciliation and Redemption: Jazz, Paradise “IN SEARCH OF MY MOTHER’S GARDEN: I FOUND MY OWN”: REMEMBERING MOTHER, RECLAIMING SELF IN JAZZ Morrison’s sixth novel Jazz, the second book in a trilogy, tells the story of unmothered children who never take the journey from motherlove to self-love, and thus never come to know their own selves. Morrison argues that before a child can love herself, she must experience herself being loved and learn that she is indeed valuable and deserving of affection. This novel, more than Morrison’s earlier writings, emphasizes how essential mothering is for the emotional wellbeing of children. This section on Jazz will examine the mother-child relationship of Violet and Rose, Joe and Wild, and explore how the loss of the mother fractures and displaces the child’s developing self. As Violet and Joe grow into adulthood, they simultaneously seek to forget and to find the mother they lost through coping strategies of denial and substitution. However, in repressing the pain of their loss and in attempting to replace the mother in adult relationships, Violet and Joe move farther from their own original selves. Only when they mourn the loss of their mothers is recovery of adult selfhood made possible. Jazz is thus a story about the wounding and healing of the unmothered children. Rose Violet: “The girl her mother would have liked” Near the beginning of the novel the narrator describes what she calls Violet’s “private cracks”: I call them cracks because that is what they were. Not openings or breaks, but dark fissures in the globe light of the day. She wakes up in the morning and sees with perfect clarity a string of small, well-lit scenes. In each one something specific is being done. . . . But she does not see herself doing these things. She sees them being done. The globe light holds and bathes each scene, and it can be assumed that at the curve where the light stops is a solid foundation. In truth, there is no foundation at all, but alleyways, crevices one steps across all the time. But the globe light is imperfect too. Closely examined it shows seams, ill-glued cracks and weak places beyond which is anything. . . . Sometimes when Violet isn’t paying attention she stumbles onto these cracks. (22–23) This passage describes radical dislocation of self, a fragmented subjectivity. Violet ’s observation that “[s]he sees them being done...