The Journey Back: Images of Africa, Africanism, and Motherhood in Toni Morrison and Alice Walker’s Literature

Authors like Toni Morrison and Alice Walker are committed to the notion of the “journey back”, that is, revisiting the past through their writing in their effort to represent images of Africa and the African culture in the light of their own experiences and to redress the imbalance in history books and consequently reclaim power and authenticity for their society through their literary works.

Issues of authenticity, mediation and African influences are increasingly important in literature by African-American women authors because it is through these tropes that they seek to recover their “repressed” or “silenced” history, often in complex accounts of their relationships involving their African heritage, their people’s enslavement and their contemporary existence. Parallels between narratives about slavery, motherhood, maternity are made to add wholeness to the African-American women’s experience of being colored and being a part of a rich cultural heritage. I wish to focus in my paper on two African-American women authors, namely, Toni Morrison and Alice Walker and how in their works images of Africa, Africanism and themes of motherhood and maternity recur and also the ways in which the protagonists must come to terms with their past (experiences of slavery), negotiate it with their present to create a future.

Amy K.Levin is of the view that contemporary novels by African-American women authors such as the Morrison and Walker ”repeatedly link initiation, rebirth, flight and water.” For instance in Morrison’s Beloved, two immersions occur. First the heroine Sethe practically drowns when she is escaping her master and in labor with her daughter Denver. This episode marks the “death of her slave self , as well as her initiation into the world of free Blacks.” [Levin].Later, Sethe slashes the throat of her daughter Beloved rather than return her to the world of slavery. At this time, Beloved is initiated into the cruelties of racism; significantly her ghost later surfaces from the river, covered in mud. These images yields meanings closely connected to the oppression suffered under the clutches of slavery and other such African experiences.  Sethe’s uneasy relationship with the community in which she lives can also be understood in terms of a cultural dislocation; as in a separation from her African heritage. On the other hand, Alice Walker deals with the tensions experienced by Africans and African-Americans when they come into contact.

The theme of motherhood is something that strikes one the most when reading the works of Morrison and Walker, especially in the former author’s Beloved, it is dealt with intensely. A loose reading of the text may tempt a white reader, or any “outsider” for that matter to interpret Sethe as a destructive maternal model, given that she stabs her daughter who later resurfaces as the ghost Beloved. Closer examination reveals that she is only penalized because of not living up to white norms of motherhood, even though the standards are not appropriate to her circumstances. It is interesting to see how the themes of motherhood are inextricably linked with images of African traditions, traditions that specifically affect women. Sharon Holland’s “Bakalu Discourse: The language of the Margin in Toni Morrison’s Beloved” suggests that the ghost in Morrison’s novel is an “African retention”, linked to the Yoruba river goddess Osun. Likewise, Carol Boyce Davis refers to the Yoruba abiku, children who die young and return to trouble their mothers.

  Because of the indirect transmission of traditional influences and the unwritten history of many African women, these writers face an urgent need to combine imagination, (re)memory and knowledge in representing Africa. This is consequently how their texts invoke questions of authenticity and appropriation. If Morrison focuses on characters that exists in spaces between cultures, races or life stages; Walker’s works chart a return to Africa and suggest continuity in the suffering of Black women on both continents. Amy.K.Levin suggests that Morrison concentrates in the complexities of the “in-between” and that her works such as Beloved and Tar Baby explore the distinctions between myth and history, life and death, the physical and the metaphysical. Levin also notes how correspondingly characters inhabit or undergo transformative experiences in marginal spaces. For instance, in Beloved, Sethe gives birth in a secluded spot between dense woods and the Ohio river. She imagines the baby in her stomach as an antelope dancing within her. This in turn mingles with images of her African mother like an antelope. Sethe has never seen an antelope but she has access to her African legacy in this marginal setting. It is this marginal space, the liminality that links two culture in Morrison’s Beloved.

Beloved is often understood as a slave narrative and Morrison extends her study of Black female community. Baby Suggs, the matriarch of the household at 124 Bluestone Road, leads the women of the community in their meetings in the Clearing, which resonates with allusions to African ritual. Amy K.Levin interprets the Clearing episode as “a liminal space between the past and present, the spirit and the body that is its conduit.”[p.65] Monni Adams indicates that in African culture, such places offer an opportunity to control dangerous forest spirits through ritual and dance. Beloved, a ghost hovering between life and death is clearly a liminal being. The incarnation of the ghost creates a crisis. The presence, first invisible, then visible, of the ghost, indicates the existence of the past within the present. If Beloved is viewed as a metaphor for the past, then ultimately the past in the novel literally sucks life from the present. The need for the exorcism between the mother and the daughter arises. Beloved can be understood as referring back to a past too painful to comfort and history that is “unspeakable”, even as it seeps into the present. This resurgent of the past or the enactment of re-memory is a cruelty that others wish to leave behind, something that must be forgotten as it cannot be reintegrated into the present fully. Beloved stands as a metaphor for and about a heritage and the recurrence of histories that have been lost or ignored. Slave narratives tell of the task that African mothers undertook to care for their children under extremely difficult situations. With the break-up of the African family constantly posing at a threat, the slaves especially women did all they could to prevent the destruction. Enslaved Americans were deeply committed to the idea of keeping their family together at any cost.

Darlene Clark Hine talks about two intimate forms of resistance in the slave narratives- that of infanticide and abortion. She writes, “The conscious decision on the part of the slave woman to terminate her pregnancy was one that was totally beyond the control of the master of the plantation.” If women did not resist slavery through actually having an abortion, they did so covertly by aiding those who desired them. But more than abortion, the most psychologically devastating means that the slave mother had of undermining the slave system was infanticide. Hine writes, “There are a number of instances in which a slave woman simply decided to end her child’s life rather than allow the child to grow up enslaved. Slave parents who took their children’s lives appear to have done so out of love as well, a different form of love.” They had a clear understanding of the living death that awaited their children under and slavery and said to others they killed their children because they loved them too much. The emotional wreckage that a mother must have felt by killing her child is captured hauntingly by Morrison in the relationship between Sethe and Beloved. For Sethe, Beloved is a test, a challenge to negotiate her past “guilt” with her present. Beloved’s vengeful return seems to convey the bewilderment and anger that a victim of infanticide may have felt. Sethe apparently cannot let go of her guilt even though she appears to have moved on with life. According to Stephanie Demetrakopolous, “Sethe’s guilt has recreated Beloved”, and the spirit acts out her mother’s emotions: Sethe’s grieves, her rage and most of all, her fear of forgetting. 

Slavery itself was the beginning of a journey for African-Americans and Beloved charts a “journey back”, one that involves not just physical locations but also the other tiers of geography consisting of spiritual or cultural spaces. Commonly known by critics as the genre of “ghostwriting”, the means by which contemporary authors visit the themes and rhetorical devices of slave autobiographies. The problem of locating an “authentic”, “unwritten self” gains expression in the climatic scene from Beloved, that is the exorcism of the ghost from the Clearing episode. Amy K.Levin is of the view that critics commonly view this episode as “a victory for the re-united community of women, which, in claiming its voice, banishes the ghosts of slavery’s past.”

Morrison inserts four manifestations of ghostwriting in her text: first, as whites appropriate the African American as “surrogate and enabler” in the creation of a racially inflected culture; second, as the contemporary African-American author reappropriates the story of slavery and speaks for her ancestors; third, as communities and individuals “pass on” limited versions of history; and fourth, as ghostly African presences within the fiction inscribe or voice alternative plots. Instead of supporting the view that slavery silenced black women with its violence and oppression, this genre reveals how voices find alternative channels, ones that might be destructive, but are powerful nonetheless.

Engaged in an endeavor analogous to other women writers’ treatment of slavery, Walker gives characters that perform acts of resistance and self-creation. She particularly deals with issues that many people would prefer to leave in obscurity: rape, incest, sexism among Blacks and more recently- female excision. Barbara Christian remarks in “Alice Walker: The Black Woman Artist as Wayward,” “there is a sense in which the ’forbidden’ in society is consistently approached by Walker as a possible route to truth”. Walker seeks to transform this secrecy into a source of power, agency and creativity. In her study of the ritual of excision, Walker tries to universalize the problem by introducing a white American woman whose mother arranged for her to be circumcised as a child. In most of her works, she constantly makes connections to link the two continents. In her essay, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, she focuses on America, tracing her lineage through her mother and grandmother. Houston Baker illustrates the way an image grounded in African-American culture may recover a lost past: ” By phenomenological recovering her mother’s vernacular “garden” and presenting it as a literate poetic image…Walker opens the field of Afro-American women’s consciousness in its founding radiance and claims for herself an enduring spiritual legacy.” In depicting the lives of women in Africa, Walker confronts readers with the failures of societies that might idealize as authentic and uncorrupted in contrast to American civilization. Having deconstructed these images of the subcontinent, she forces readers to examine similarities between their lives and cultures many of them would consider barbaric. In this way she suggests a continuous relationship in the experiences and suffering of women on the two continents, instead of treating the African presence as other or of focusing on individuals negotiating between cultures (as Morrison does). But throughout Walker’s works, it is interesting to see how women who struggle are punished for their assertion of individualism; for instance, Sophia in The Color Purple. They can only reassert themselves and subvert patriarchy only through a communal/group effort but unlike Morrison’s heroines, Walker’s African women are passive and sustain themselves in serving others. For Walker’s characters such as Mbati and Pierre in Possessing the Secret of Joy, the answer to the question, “What is Africa to me?” or what is authentically African is complex for it must not only include that has been pillaged since the beginning of the slave trade, but also the societies that have been built and rebuilt since then, and the constant communication between the two continents. Walker’s subtlety lies in offering multiple or multivocal works, in which she encourages her readers to evaluate the differing voices. In doing so, like Morrison, she disempowers those who have traditionally held narrative authority, and de-centers the importance of narrative itself.