Women's Work: Nationalism and Contemporary African American Women's Novels

5 / Inscribing Community: Toni Morrison’s Paradise

5 / Inscribing Community: Toni Morrison’s Paradise A letter composed in smeared lipstick, cuts on a woman’s skin, a name scratched into the dirt, a lengthy genealogy burned rather than published , paintings of women’s bodies on a basement floor—women in Toni Morrison’s 1997 novel Paradise inscribe texts and images that struggle to become public or even legible. Created but rarely read, inscriptions in the world of the novel do not depend on an audience to create multiple meanings. In order to account for the obscured, hidden, and erased female writings in Paradise, I read inscription, as opposed to interpretation , as a key form of women’s work in the novel. Inscription locates ambiguity of meaning—what might the letter in smeared lipstick say if it were legible? what was documented in the destroyed genealogy?—with the work of creating these markings rather than with the work of reading them. This calls attention away from men arguing over how to read the monuments and documents of their history and turns instead to women inscribing words and images as a means of fashioning self and community . Alongside organizing in Bambara’s The Salt Eaters, cooking in Shange’s Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo, dancing in Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow, and mapping in Naylor’s Mama Day, inscribing in Morrison ’s Paradise reclaims and redefines cultural nationalism as women’s work, both everyday and extraordinary. At the close of the twentieth century, Paradise concludes two decades of fiction that claims nationalism as a practice of women. inscribing community / 141 Inscribing Women’s Stories Inscription is not synonymous with Gerard Genette’s paratext or Ashraf Rushdy’s palimpsest, though it shares traits with both of these useful terms. For Genette, paratext is a “threshold” that permits entry into a text (1–2). The paratext “is empirically made up of a heterogeneous group of practices and discourses,” including title, author’s name, typesetting , dedication, epigraph, preface, and notes (2). As we will see in the case of Paradise, Morrison describes or narrates inscriptions but does not reproduce them in her novel. Paratexts, on the other hand, appear in, around, or beyond the pages of the primary text. In this sense, Naylor ’s map of Willow Springs and family tree in Mama Day are paratexts because they appear in the front matter of the novel, while Morrison’s genealogyofthefirstfamiliesofRubyinParadiseisaninscriptionbecause she describes the document and narrates its production and destruction without reproducing even an excerpt of its contents.1 Genette also counts interviews, generic context, the date or period in which a work was written, literary awards, and information about a book or author as forms of paratext (7). This gets a bit closer to inscription because the paratext may be transmitted verbally (as in a classroom lecture or a radio interview, or otherwise told rather than printed) such that it, like Morrison ’s inscriptions, exists somewhere in the world beyond the text but has an important influence on how a reader receives the work. Genette’s notion of paratext as a threshold provides another reason to use inscription as a distinct term. Genette imagines the paratext as an “airlock that helps the reader pass without too much respiratory difficulty from one world to the other, a sometimes delicate operation, especially when the second world is a fictional one” (408). For example, the “Oprah’s Book Club” sticker and “Book of the Month Club Selection” banner on the current edition of Paradise are paratexts that invite in the reader who has enjoyed other books with these designations. Morrison’s inscriptions are barriers to entry rather than thresholds. Inscription is the creation and function of markings rather than their actual content; for example, readers of Paradise see the impact, but not the words, of a lipstick letter that Seneca discovers as a girl. Ashraf Rushdy’s study of African American “palimpsest narratives” is useful here as well, but palimpsest is not a synonym for inscription. For Rushdy, palimpsest narratives are novels that are, in various ways, about slavery, “the family secret of America” that “haunts the peripheries of the national imaginary” (2). Inscriptions also trade in secrets that, like 142 / WOMEN’S WORK slavery, are simultaneously known and unknowable. Inscriptions, like palimpsest narratives, often try to work out or document “the meaning of the past for the present” for both individuals and their communities (5). Inscription differs, however, from the palimpsest narrative...