Toni Morrison and the Idea of Africa (review)

This book traces how two Kongo cosmological concepts, the Yowa cosmogram and Bandoki witchcraft, inhabit the North American world of Morrison's novels. The book analyzes the appearance of these Africa derived notions of matter, spirit, ethics, and morality in the ways Morrison's black American characters organize and manage physical and social space, human relations, temporality, self-consciousness, morality, and transcendence in general. The observed patterns, Jennings argues, indicate that "an aesthetic goal of Morrison's fiction is to dust off the survivals of West and Central Africa traditional civilizations that Christianity obscures in the Western hemisphere" (2). Within Yowa geospatial thinking, as in Morrison's stories, nightfall does not end the day, and death does not terminate life. The analysis erases all doubts about the validity of the "circled cross" (the geometric form of the Yowa cosgmography) in Morrison's marking of important spaces: Sula's Medallion, children's play in Song of Solomon, Jadine Childs's "mock-possession dance" in Tar Baby, the "quartered circle branded" under the breast of Sethe's mother in Beloved, ritual circles inside the nuns' coven in Paradise, and so forth.

Eva Peace shows like a Kongo witch; Beloved shifts shape like one, and the stoic mien of Baby Suggs suggests that she belongs to that class of humans who, regardless of physical or social laws, are believed to have the power of willing deeply felt desires into existence. Jennings argues convincingly that these women are best understood within an Africanist spiritual reality that New World black folks synthesized and sustained over centuries and not within the Western Christianity they were obliged to profess. Jennings's framing metaphor is predominantly spatial: New World African cosmology "operates largely below the threshold of modern African-American consciousness" (2) because the hegemonic order within which the enslaved and the racially oppressed lived necessitated that all forms of independent self-conception be subterranean.

Jennings's main achievement is her attribution of the quirky ways of Morrison's characters to creolized Africanisms on space, well spent time, judicious conduct, and beauty. To the reader trained in "Euro-American" spirituality, Morrison's characters cannot but be very strange because the main tenets of Christianity to which they are outwardly devoted do not quite govern the narratively significant events they foment. How, for instance, does Eva Peace justify her deliberate incineration of her drug addict son? As countless critics have pondered, doesn't Sethe's relationship to Beloved imply some deep pathology? Morrison scholars often judge both women insane when in reality their acts make perfect sense within the moral complex—infraction, conscience, punishment, and so forth—that subtends internal communal relations among black folks on Bluestone Road, Cincinnati, Ohio, circa 1855, and Medallion, also in Ohio, but mid-twentieth century. Pursuing a deep archaeology of black being in the Americas, Jennings maps out the oblique directions through which cultural principles persist, with the most significant contents decoyed deeply inside the manifest forms.

Of course, Jennings admits, knowing that Kongo's "geometric Yowa or cosmogram" is a device that structures space and time in Morrison's work "is not essential to the appreciation of her novels." After all, most of the characters in the heavily Christianized environment of the stories do not display a conscious awareness of the presence of the Yowa, even if it is obvious that many of their important motions trace out the crossed circle. Nonetheless, Jennings insists, ignorance of the presence of African spirituality in Morrison's novels "diminishes the aesthetic, cultural, historical, and political force of the artist and her artform" (5). How else can a reader grasp the import of Sixo's unique rituals, superstitions, and ultimate defiance in Beloved? Without fathoming the African sources of "the art of exercising unusual ambivalent powers" (24) that Morrison infuses into their behaviors and thoughts, one might classify her panoply of unusual characters as evil incarnated. Interpreted with the knowledge of the Kongo Bandoki in mind, [End...