Beloved, and: Duties, Pleasures, and Conflicts: Essays in Struggle, and: Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (review)

190 the minnesota review REVIEWS Beloved by Toni Morrison. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987. pp. 275. $18.95 (cloth). Duties, Pleasures, and Conflicts: Essays in Struggle by Michael Thelwell. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987. pp. 258. $27.50 (cloth); $10.95 (paper). Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory andthe Foundations ofBlackAmerica by Sterling Stuckey. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. pp. 425. $27.50 (cloth). In the background of Afro-American written expression is history's pulsating presence, a presence that is alternately acknowledged, denied, but most often negotiated and pushed into some dark and cavernous recess where its force and presence need not be fully acknowledged. Toni Morrisson's Beloved, Michael ThelweU's Duties, Pleasures, and Conflicts : Essays in Struggle, and SterUng Stuckey's Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations ofBlack America each, in varying degrees, uses history in an active fashion: the meaning of events and facts guides each narrative and thereby makes the past contemporary , the present understandable, and the future, when it is a result of unchanged trends, predictable. When history is acknowledged in fiction, but not allowed to play a role in the development of plot or character, it is playing a negotiated role. The plots in such fiction are repetitive, characters are supremely articulate though often unable to integrate their intelligence with the requirements of any given historical moment; additionally, this fiction is characterized by modernist styUstics and symbolic richness. The most representative novel in this respect is EUison's Invisible Man. When history is acknowledged in social or cultural analysis but does not provide reasons for choices Afro-Americans make (everything from who to vote for to who to marry), it is playing a negotiated role. The analyses which result when history plays this role often acknowledge past injustices shot through the Afro-American community and then assert in a variety of ways that Afro-Americans must let go ofany bitterness for which their historical relationship with Euro-Americans might account. Such is the negotiation: the strain toward enlightened amnesia. When history plays a static role in Afro-American fiction, frozen and exquisite protraits of pain result as in Gloria Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place, where, in a sense, we are looking at the unfortunate offspring of Bigger Thomas. These Native Daughters, much like Bigger, display neither an ability to dream nor the mother wit necessary to move far from Ustless reflection. For such characters, the world is knowable only as a series of objective occurrences and when mediation occurs — usually through religion — it functions only to make Ufe less alienating than it would ordinarily be. To paraphrase Cato, the white house slave in Ishmael Reed's Flight to Canada, seeing is believing, anything else is just reactionary mysticism. When history plays a static role in social and cultural analysis, Afro-Americans are blamed for their place in Ufe. Comparisons are made between Afro-Americans and various ethnic groups who have advanced economically. Thomas Sowell expresses the letter and spirit of this point of view when he writes that "The past is a great unchangeable fact. Nothing is going to undo its sufferings and injustices" ("Are Quotas Good for Blacks," Commentary , June 1978, p. 42). When history plays an active role in Afro-American fiction, the plots often rely on the power of folklore and myth and are therefore cycUcal or non-linear. The characters arealways unusual people who are not well understood through references to the material conditions of their lives. Rather, they are alternately saints and sinners whose powers seem to precede even their births so that they seem agents or messengers of the gods or ancestors. Ishmael Reviews 191 Reed, Charles Johnson, David Bradley, Toni Cade Bambara, and of course, Toni Morrison are excellent examples of novelists who use history in an active fashion. When history plays an active role in social and cultural analysis, the narratives manage to convey both facts and a continuity of meanings which encompass the historical period comprising a given narrative; additionally, the period which precedes the narrative and the period which foUows it are made understandable. In effect, such narratives are timeless because they assume and illustrate some fundamental aspect of...