Toni Morrison's Lorain

Description

Toni Morrison’s “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation” emphasizes the importance of community as a source of creative expression in African American life. In Lorain and elsewhere, communal practices such as church life, music, and storytelling have often helped shaped their identity and sustained their resilience in the face of racism and exclusion. Although these practicess varied by region and individual experience, they provided meaningful ways for people to express themselves and support one another.

The author explores the importance of understanding ancestry in literature. Readers bring their own assumptions and experiences to works such as Sula, which can lead to different interpretations of the same characters and events. In Song of Solomon, Morrison further emphasizes family relationships and the influence of ancestors on individual identity. 

For Morrison, understanding the past is essential to understanding the present. Her own family history, including the influence of her grandparents, demonstrates how earlier generations can shape the values and perspectives of those who follow them. Likewise, the history of Lorain, including its communities, racial tensions, and changing social conditions, formed part of the environment that influenced Morrison’s imagination. Growing up during an era of widespread racial segregation and discrimination, she repeatedly examined how collective memory of the past shape both individual lives and communities.

This essay was originally published in Black Women Writers, 1950-1980, edited by Mari Evans (New York: Anchor Doubleday, 1984), 339-45.  

"There must have been a time when an artist could be genuinely representative of the tribe and in it; when an artist could have tribal or racial sensibility and an individual expression of it. There were spaces and places in which a single person could enter and behave as an individual within the context of the community. A small remnant of that you can see sometimes in Black churches where people shout. It is a very personal grief and a personal statement done among people you trust. Done within the context of the community, therefore safe...while the shouter is performing some rite that is extremely subjective, the other people are performing as a community in protecting that person. So you have a public and private expression going on at the same time." (339)

"My sense of the novel is that it has always functioned for the class or the group that wrote it. The history of a novel as a form began when there was a new class, a middle class, to read it; it was an art form that they needed. The lower classes didn't need novels at that time because they had an art form already: they had songs, and dances, and ceremony, and gossip, and celebrations. The aristocracy didn't need it because they had the art that they had patronized... [T]here emerged a new class of people who were neither peasants nor aristocrats... [T]hey produced an art form: we call it the novel of manners...[the] social rules and explained behavior, identified outlaws, identified the people, habits, and customs that one should approve of." (340)

"[W]hen the peasant class, or lower class, or what have you, confronts the middle class, the city, or the upper classes, they are thrown a little bit into disarray. For a long time, the art form that was healing for Black people was music. That music is no longer exclusively ours; we don't have exclusive rights to it. Other people sing it and play it; it is the mode of contemporary music everywhere. So another form has to take that place, and it seems to me that the novel is needed by African-Americans now in a way that it was not needed before- and it is following along the lines of function of novels everywhere." (340)

"There are things that I try to incorporate into my fiction that are directly and deliberately related to what I regard as the major characteristics of Black art, wherever it is. One of which is the ability to be both print and oral literature: to combine those two aspects so that the stories can be read in silence, of course, but one should be able to hear them as well. It should try deliberately to make you stand up and make you feel something profoundly in the same way that a Black preacher requires his congregation to speak, to join him in the sermon, to behave in a certain way, to stand up and to weep and to cry and to accede or to change and to modify- to expand on the sermon that is being delivered. In the same way that a musician's music is enhanced when there is a response from the audience. Now, in a book, which closes, after all- it's of some importance to me to try to make that connection- to try to make that happen also." (341)

"I touched a little hit on some of the other characteristics [or distinctive elements of African-American writing], one of which was oral quality, and the participation of the reader and the chorus. The only thing that I would add... [I]s the presence of an ancestor... [T]hese ancestors are not just parents, they are sort of timeless people whose relationships to the characters are benevolent, instructive, and protective, and they provide a certain kind of wisdom." (342-343)

"[T]here is a notion that that's what the artist is--always in confrontation with his own society, and you can see the differences in the way in which literature is interpreted. Whether or not Sula is nourished by that village depends on your view of it. I know people who believe that she was destroyed by it. My own special view is that there was no other place where she was permitted to "be" only in that context, and no one stoned her or killed her or threw her out... [I]t's difficult to see who the winners are if you are not looking at it from that point of view. When the hero returns to the fold- returns to the tribe--it is seen by certain white critics as a defeat, by others as a triumph, and that is a difference in what the aims of the art are." (343)

"Pilate [in the Song of Solomon] had a dozen years of close, nurturing relationships with two males- her father and her brother. And that intimacy and support was in her and made her fierce and loving because she had that experience. Her daughter Reba had less of that and related to men in a very shallow way... [Reba] had even less of an association with men as a child, so that the progression is really a diminishing of their abilities because of the absence of men in a nourishing way in their lives. Pilate is the apogee of all that: of the best of that which is female and the best of that which is male, and that balance is disturbed if it is not nurtured, and if it is not counted on and if it is not reproduced." (344)

"You know there are a lot of people who talk about the position that men hold as of primary importance, but actually it is if we don't keep in touch with the ancestor that we are, in fact, lost. The point of the books is that it is our job. When you kill the ancestor you kill yourself. I want to point out the dangers, to show that nice things don't always happen to the totally self-reliant if there is no conscious historical connection. To say, see--this is what will happen." (344)

"If anything I do, in the way of writing novels (or whatever I write) isn't about the village or the community or about you, then it is not about anything. I am not interested in indulging myself in some private, closed exercise of my imagination that fulfills only the obligation of my personal dreams- which is to say yes, the work must be political. It must have that as its thrust... [T]he best art is political and you ought to be able to make it unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time." (344)