“SULA” BY TONI MORRISON
- THE BLACK COMMUNITY -
ANA-LUCREŢIA NEDELCU
Toni
Morrison’s first novel, “The Bluest Eye” (1970), was acclaimed as the work of
an important talent, written- as John Leonard said in The New York Times- in a
prose “so precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder
that the novel becomes poetry”. It was actually necessary to expose this
comment that finally leads us to our topic today, Morrison’s second novel,
“Sula” and the fact that it has the same power, the same beauty.
The
action is taking place in the Bottom. The Bottom is the mostly black community
in Ohio, situated in the hills above the mostly white, wealthier community of
Medallion. The first became a community when a master gave it to his former
slave. This “gift” was in fact a trick: the master gave the former slave a poor
stretch of hilly land, convincing the slave the land was worthwhile by claiming
that because it was hilly, it was closer to heaven. The trick, though, led to
the growth of a vibrant community. Now the community faces a new threat: wealthy
whites have taken a liking to the land, and would like to destroy much of the
town in order to build a golf course. The demolition of Bottom’s old shacks to
make room for a pristine golf course seems like an improvement. However,
Morrison states the Bottom was once a vibrant community filled with laughing
voices and a parade of unique, interesting people. The building of the golf
course is in fact the displacement of this vibrant community being an example
of homogeneity encroaching upon what was once unique.
At its centre- a friendship between two women, a
friendship whose intensity first sustains and then injures. Sula and Nel- both
black, both smart, both poor, raised in a small Ohio town- meet when they are
twelve, wishbone thin and dreaming of princes. Through their girlhood years
they share everything- perceptions, judgments, yearnings, secrets, even crime-
until Sula gets out, out of the Bottom, the hilltop neighborhood where, beneath
the sporting life of the men hanging around the place in head rags and soft
felt hats, there hides a fierce resentment at failed crops, lost jobs, thieving
insurance men, bug-ridden flour…at the invisible line that cannot be
overstepped.
Sula leaves it and roams the cities of America for
ten years. Then she returns to the town, to her friend. But Nel is a wife now,
settled with her man and her three children. She belongs. She adjusts to the
Bottom, where you avoid the hand of God by getting in it, by staying upright
helping out at church supper, asking after folks- where you deal with evil by
surviving it. Not Sula. As willing to feel pain as to give pain, she can never adjust.
Nel cannot understand her anymore, and the others never did. Sula scares them.
Mention her now, and they recall that she put her grandmother in an old folk’s
home (the old lady who let a train take her leg for the insurance)… that a
child drowned in the river years ago…that there was a plague of robins when she
first returned.
In clear, dark, resonant language, Toni Morrison
brilliantly evokes not only a bond between two lives, but the harsh, loveless,
ultimately mad world in which that bond is destroyed, the world of the Bottom
and its people, through 40 years, up to the time of their bewildered
realization that even more than they feared Sula, their pariah, they needed
her. In this context of paradox, we must point out that the novel has a general
theme, the feminist theme and the fact that most of the women characters take
on masculine roles (Sula being the main example for the power of her personality),
and its most important theme of good vs. evil. This theme affects everyone in
the book, especially Nel and Sula. Most readers would consider Nel the “good”
girl, and Sula would be labeled as the “bad” girl. However, towards the end of
Sula’s life, she presents Nel with an idea that maybe she was the “good” one
all along, and Nell was the “bad” girl. Taken together, the girls seem to form
two halves of a whole.
The paradox mentioned earlier is related to the view
of the black community about the facts and the characters. The black community
has a very important role in the novel, representing the context that characterizes
the persons involved and, through its point of view, makes an excellent self-
description. It must be remembered and explained that the mentality of that
time was characterized by a deep racism and a great power of unwillingness. The
Bottom is a superstitious community. They cannot accept Sula for what she is, a
rebel, and they put her in contrast with Nel, a settled person.
It’s worth mentioning here some features of each
girl, in order to point out the exact way of thinking. Nel’s household is bound
by the social standards that define the conventional meaning of “family”:
static, repressive, orderly, well-kept, in agreement with the community norms,
while Sula’s house is built on unconventional multigenerational family
structure: run by women, vibrant, active, subject to constant change, huge and
rambling. The houses symbolize the differing potential for growth and change in
the girls’ families. The theme of good vs. evil applies here, Sula being the
truly evil. The black community rallies to defend itself against Sula. She has
done the unthinkable: she has put her grandmother, Eva Peace, in a nursing
home- for this, she is labeled “roach”. In addition, she has had some form of
sexual encounter with her best friend’s husband and then moved on to other
lovers- for this transgression, she is labeled “bitch”. Everyone remembers the
plague of filthy robins associated with Sula’s returning to the Bottom (“In
spite of their fear, they reacted to an oppressive oddity, or what they called
evil days, with an acceptance that bordered on welcome. Such evil must be
avoided, they felt, and precautions must naturally be taken to protect
themselves from it”), and they resurrect the old anecdote about Sula’s
passively watching her mother burn to death; they decide once and for all that
Sula’s birthmark is really Hannah’s ashes. But the most heinous of her crimes
is that she has slept with white men. The strong damnation of such an
indictment is derived from the racism under which the entire community has
suffered. Sula’s alleged interracial affairs are perceived as an affront to all
of the black people living in the Bottom. Her every move becomes suspect, and
even random occurrences of bad luck are attributed to her. Her apparent defiance
of physical and moral laws galvanizes the black community against her. Sula is
unnatural: she doesn’t age, has lost no teeth, never bruises, refuses to wear
underwear at church suppers, has never been sick, and doesn’t belch when she
drinks beer. When she bewitches Shadrack into tipping his imaginary hat to her,
the community is convinced that Sula is both devil and evil personified. Fully
aware that she is the town’s pariah, Sula does as she pleases, when she
pleases. Ironically, the community’s labeling of Sula as evil actually improves
their own lives. Her presence in the community gives them the impetus to live
harmoniously with one another. Teapot’s mother was once a negligent parent, but
she begins to care for her son as a result of her hatred for Sula.
Sula’s presence gives the residents of the Bottom a
stronger sense of collective identity and strength. Her affairs with white men
give them a stronger sense of outrage against the interracial relationships,
which actually are exploitative. Therefore, Sula’s presence also gives them a
stronger sense of racial identity. Although the community regards her as an
evil person, her return to the Bottom is actually far more than it appears to
be. It is actually a blessing in disguise. What seems like a chaotic disruption
in the social fabric is in fact an ordering and focusing influence. But the
people see things differently. Sula dies. She reflects on her life without
regret. She feels that she has milked all the experiences she can out of life.
She is also happy that she is unique in her way of being, of thinking, of
acting, and she knows she has left something good after her. But the community
views Sula’s death as a positive event (“The death of Sula Peace was the best
news folks up in the Bottom had had since the promise of work at the tunnel”).
However, events are again not what they seem at
first. Besides the natural misfortunes of weather and the social misfortune of
racism, the community has lost the binding influence of Sula’s presence. The community’s
moral resolve and harmony dissolve in the absence of the woman who, in breaking
social conventions, motivated others to uphold them. The final chapter closes
the circular narrative of the novel. Nell reflects on the ambiguous blessings
of “social progress”: the former residents of the Bottom now have more civil
rights, and they have been wealthier in the years following the war. On the
surface, this seems like a positive thing. However, they have also lost
something: the disintegration of the collective social identity that began with
Sula’s death has only grown worse; the community, which once defined the
Bottom, has been replaced by a town in which the people live in relative
isolation from one another (“Then Medallion turned silver. It seemed sudden,
but actually there had been days and days of no snow- just frost- when, late
one afternoon, a rain fell and froze. […]…but up in the Bottom black folks
suffered heavily in their thin houses and thinner clothes. […] Hard on the
heels of the general relief that Sula’s death brought a restless irritability
took hold. [...] Now that Sula was dead and done with, they returned to a
steeping resentment of the burdens of old people. […] In the meantime the
Bottom had collapsed.[…] The black people, for all their new look, seemed
awfully anxious to get to the valley, or leave town, and abandon the hills to
whoever was interested. It was sad because the Bottom had been a real place.
These young ones kept talking about the community, but they left the hills to the
poor, the old, the stubborn- and the rich white folks. Maybe it hadn’t been a
community, but it had been a place. Now there weren’t any place left, just
separate houses with separate televisions and separate telephones and less and
less dropping by.”).
Maybe that all these facts wouldn’t have happened and
the people would have understood better the newness if Nel and Sula had formed
a single person. Separately, each of them is excessive in her way and they
cannot live separately. In essence, they represent two halves of the same
equation; and, as such, neither can be worse than the other.
The
famous New York Times said once about “Sula”: “Extravagantly
beautiful…Enormously, achingly alive…A howl of love and rage, playful and funny
as well as hard and bitter”.
ANA-LUCREŢIA NEDELCU (pen name LiterAnART) is Romanian.
She has been writing for ten years and she has widely published in her country
and abroad, having multiple international collaborations. She is a writer,
poetess, journalist, researcher, book editor and translator. She also teaches
creative writing workshops and represents the World Poetry Canada association
in her country. Together with the association, she is about to publish this
year the “Creative writing 10”- a series of workshops dedicated to literary and
journalistic creation and implemented in her country of origin in 2016.
ANA-LUCREŢIA NEDELCU
Romania
No comments:
Post a Comment