Something she says through one of Song of Solomon's characters, Susan Byrd, strikes me as a through-line in much of Morrison's work, something that sums up some of the main reasons why her work is so important:
"Those must have been some times, back then. Some bad times. It's a wonder anybody knows who anybody is." (324)
In her essay The Site of Memory, Morrison talks about reading slave narratives and the realization that there's so much information we have lost; crucially, we rarely have access to the interior lives of the enslaved. Morrison's work then, does the absolutely necessary work of excavating those lives:
"On the basis of some information and a little bit of guesswork you journey to a site to see what remains were left behind and to reconstruct the world that these remains imply. What makes it fiction is the nature of the imaginative act: my reliance on the image - on the remains - in addition to recollection, to yield up a kind of a truth."
And it certainly does feel like a kind of truth. Morrison quotes Zora Neale Hurston:
"Like the dead-seeming cold rocks, I have memories within that came out of the material that went to make me."
Whew. So basically what we have in Song of Solomon, to my mind, is an excavation, firmly rooted in "fidelity to the milieu... in which my ancestors actually lived", and presentation to all who would listen of the interior lives, and the generational interior lives, of the enslaved. Which of course are beautifully complex, like this story. Full of mythology and the kind of hope that bends reality and stories - lots of stories.
And of course, by doing this, she rings the bells in the interior lives of us all. This connects us, whatever our race or nationality, to those enslaved people and helps us understand. Perhaps helps us be a little more human. For me, it's like she throws open a curtain we all assumed, and some of us hoped, was sealed shut by history. It strikes at something visceral and real. I love how Morrison summed it up in a video I watched:
"This story is about a young man learning to fly."
What are your thoughts? Feel free to discuss in this thread.
Something she says through one of Song of Solomon's characters, Susan Byrd, strikes me as a through-line in much of Morrison's work, something that sums up some of the main reasons why her work is so important:
"Those must have been some times, back then. Some bad times. It's a wonder anybody knows who anybody is." (324)
In her essay The Site of Memory, Morrison talks about reading slave narratives and the realization that there's so much information we have lost; crucially, we rarely have access to the interior lives of the enslaved. Morrison's work then, does the absolutely necessary work of excavating those lives:
"On the basis of some information and a little bit of guesswork you journey to a site to see what remains were left behind and to reconstruct the world that these remains imply. What makes it fiction is the nature of the imaginative act: my reliance on the image - on the remains - in
addition to recollection, to yield up a kind of a truth."
And it certainly does feel like a kind of truth. Morrison quotes Zora Neale Hurston:
"Like the dead-seeming cold rocks, I have memories within that came out
of the material that went to make me."
Whew. So basically what we have in Song of Solomon, to my mind, is an excavation, firmly rooted in "fidelity to the milieu... in which my ancestors actually lived", and presentation to all who would listen of the interior lives, and the generational interior lives, of the enslaved. Which of course are beautifully complex, like this story. Full of mythology and the kind of hope that bends reality and stories - lots of stories.
And of course, by doing this, she rings the bells in the interior lives of us all. This connects us, whatever our race or nationality, to those enslaved people and helps us understand. Perhaps helps us be a little more human. For me, it's like she throws open a curtain we all assumed, and some of us hoped, was sealed shut by history. It strikes at something visceral and real. I love how Morrison summed it up in a video I watched:
"This story is about a young man learning to fly."
What are your thoughts? Feel free to discuss in this thread.
Morrison's essay The Site of Memory is available here: https://blogs.umass.edu/brusert/files....