Chapter I

Introduction:
Afro-American writing is the effort of Afro-American writers to gain recognition for

black identity. The Afro-American writing of modern period, from civil rights to the

contemporary period, emerges out of the burdens of slavery, racism and the experiences of

the generations of black people as slaves or ex-slaves. The perception of racialism which

prevails the white American hegemonic culture are the constituents of Afro-American

writings. Henry Louis Gates Jr., in Figures in Black, says ‘it is the challenge for the black

writers to refute the claim that blacks had nowritten traditions they were bearers of an inferior

culture’. (26) The Afro-American writers are the guardians of conscience and passionate

observers of the experiences of black people. The central issue of Afro-American writing is

the conscious quest of establishing and redefining blacks’ identity and their status within the

larger American society.

The sense of social exclusion and subjugation of Afro-Americans on the basis of race

and culture and the discrimination based on it are the identifiable features of Afro-American

writing. The folklore, vernacular culture and the role of music in black culture, the legendary

tales, and superimposition of social isolation accompanyone another harmonically in the

development of Afro-American novels.

Bernard W. Bell opines:

Afro-Americans’ quest is to make it possible for a man to be a Negro and an

American Without having the doors of opportunity closed, and escapeisolation. The

quest of Afro-American is for life, liberty and wholeness – thefull development of

Unity and self and the black community – as a biracial, bicultural people as

Americans and Afro-American descent. (12)

Afro-American writers address history as the central theme and mostlyreconnect

black characters with their African roots. They feel that it is their duty tohonour their

ancestors and their cultural heritage. They bring the voice and vision to along history of

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struggle with the land, color of black identity, humanity and freedom.Black literary and

cultural tradition is of men and women who have undergone andsurvived the racial holocaust

and have become tool for white supremacy. The oral tradition, myth, slavery and its

aftermath are the integral parts of Afro-American literature.

Afro-American novelists try to understand and reconcile the tension in

their consciousness that resulted from color, class, and gender conflicts between

whiteAmerican cultures and the descendent of slaves. The black American writersseek to

bridge the increasing distance between black and white Americans. The pivotal issue of Afro-

American writing lies on the point where blacks are the eternalvictims of white as a result of

slavery and its aftermath. Black people are closer toAfrica, their ancestors, values and ethics

of a society where community and cultureare supreme. Afro-American writing unearths the

truth that the strength of black people lay in a culture outside that of white American and

their self-identity can be achieved only after they connect themselves with their forefathers.

Afro-American literary tradition is the tradition of Afro-American folklore. It rests on the

foundation for the customs, practices and beliefs of Afro-American race.

Afro-American writers are preoccupied with the notion of blacks as marginalized and

black’s literature as the non-canonical literature. Their literary career starts with the crisis of

their identity as the respectable American citizens. They strive to subvert the white or black

hierarchy of mainstream discourse. Mainstream hegemonic discourse always undermines

black’s presence and heads towards white cultural supremacy. The art of Afro-American

writers is not for art’s sake but for liberation, equality and for the recognition of blacks as

American citizens. Black aestheticians’ products are structured in such a way so that the

shackles of slavery and impoverishment would fall away forever. “Art is a product and

producer in an unceasing struggle for black liberation. To be art; the product had to be

expressivity or performance designed to free minds and bodies of a subjugated people”

(Baker 13).

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 Afro-American writers attempt to prove that Afro-American products are equal to

western expressive modes. Afro-American writers try to confront the western art instead of

withdrawing from it. They are compelled to battle against racial difference, political

discrimination and economic exploitation, and the racial equality. The black aestheticians

involve themselves in the western-controlled discourse.

Afro-American writing is the call to break the boundary established by racism. But

the black writers find themselves in a very difficult situation to come out of racism. Henry

Louis Gates Jr., in Race, Writing and Difference opines: “Black people, we know, have not

been liberated from racism by our own writing. We accepted a false premise by assuming that

racism would be destroyed once white racists convinced that we were human, too”(Gates.12).

In his opinion black writing served not to obliterate the differences of race but to preserve the

cultural differences to be repeated, imitated and revised in a tradition of black difference.

According to John Oliver Killeen’s:

The American literary tradition remains incomplete if black American voice is

excluded from it. Of course, to account for the voice of black American would be

central to create or envisage the black American literary tradition. A serious study of

this perspective points to the various gaps in the American profession of freedom,

Humanness and democracy.

The literature of slavery constitutes a rebirth with echoes and refractions which dates back to

the history of slave culture. The literary works which joins revolution to the culture of slavery

are painful and frightening. Afro-American novel discloses the catalogues of man’s

inhumanity to man and woman and also the desperate struggle to survive against stupendous

odds. It secures the most basic rights in a perpetually hostile environment. The Afro-

American writer begins his or her career to exhibit the crisis of identity. The black literary

product deals with the troubled quest for identity liberty and the agony of social alienation

and the longing at times a mythical home.

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 The tradition of Afro-American novel begins with the narratives of slaves, realism

and romance. The history of Afro-American novel begins with William Wells Brown’s

Clotelle, or the Colored Heroine. Clotelle is about the abolishment of slavery. In this novel

Brown exposes the individual entrenchment of slavery in theUnited States and focuses on the

ownership of slaves in high places as professed byChristians. Through his work, Brown

appeals to the British government to use their influence to hasten the abolition of American

slavery. Clotelle employs realistic details which end melodramatically with the protagonists

and their children find a heaven in another country. Clotelle has always been regarded as a

pivotal book in black letters. Many critics consider this work as a departure point travels in

two directions in nineteenth century black writing. It is the departure point of tradition

of black social criticism and the novel.

Frank J. Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends (1857) is not an direct attack on

slavery. This novel demonstrates the problem of growing up as a free black in the city of

brotherly love and about the tragedy that overcomes an interracial couple who moves

north.The Garies and their Friends contrast the fortunes of two transplanted southern

families. It is more mimetic than historical and more didactic than romantic.The intellectual

and moral tone of the author is consistent with the story. There is verylittle distance between

the class and racial norms of the author.

Harriet E. Wilson is the third black American novelist to publish a novel inthe United

States rather than in England.Our Nig is based on her life as an indentured servant in New

England. It was published in Boston in 1859. Wilson’s double-consciousness and double

vision are apparent in the title, epigraphs, theme and the protagonist of Our Nig, the title and

author’s pseudonym; By Our Nig is an ironic play on the paternalistic identity imposed on

some black family servants by the master class. Wilson introduces the first interracial

marriage in American fiction which thewife is white and husband is African.Our Nig clearly

illustrates the conventions andcontributions of both traditions contributed to the development

of the early Afro-American novel.

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 Martin Robinson Delany's Blake (1859) was the most radical black novel of the

nineteenth century. He was leading spokesman for black independence andself –determined.

He attacked racist practices within the abolitionist movement itself.To investigate the

immigration possibilities for the black people to the independentRepublic of Texas, he took a

long perilous trip down through Mississippi, Louisiana,Texas and Arkansas in 1839. Much of

his trip is fictionalized in Blake. Delany in Blake expands the thematic and structural problem

of the slave narratives from the break-up, flight and reunification of a single family to an

international plot of general rebellionand solidarity.

The novel of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Iola Leroy or Shadows Uplifted (1892)

stresses the moral duty of black to fight and inspire others against the slavery through their

selfless dedication to social reform and service to their race. It is the first Afro-American

novel to treat the heroism of blacks during and after the civil war. The major characters

reflect the author's deep involvement in the abolitionist, temperance, and women's rights

movements.

Although William Wells Brown published the first black American novel, Charles

Waddell Chesnutt is generally considered to be the first major Afro-Americanfiction writer.

Chesnutt’s faith in God, the puritan ethics and white northern liberals fostered his belief that

blacks should prepare themselves for recognition and equality. Chesnutt won the acclaim of

white literary world with the publication of The Conjure Woman, and Other Stories

(1899) and The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line (1899). His first

novel, The House behind the Cedars (1900)is a tragic romance which received highly

favorable reviews. The Marrow of Tradition (1901), was written during the 1898 elections

in Wilmington, North Carolina.The Marrow of Traditionenriches the tradition of the Afro-

American novel. It further moves on the road towards social realism. The Colonel’ Dream

(1905) is an attack on peonage and convict lease labor system.

A distinguished man of letters and one of the intellectual giants of his age,W.E. B. Du

Bois has published five novels: The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911), Dark Princess

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(1928), The Ordeal of Mansard , Mansard Builds School (1959), and Worlds of

Color (1961). Bernard W. Bell examines:

More documentary than meditative, more appealing as historical romance than social

realism, Du Bio’s novels reflect his critical view of American society and the stylistic

flexibility of the beginnings of naturalism in the Afro-American novel. Understanding

the economic underpinnings of ester racism and imperialism, Du Bois explores the

values of American democracy, affirming them in principal while attacking those

social institutions and types that perverted them. (Bell 82)

The Negro renaissance, known as Harlem Renaissance or the New Negromovement, was the

period of the rise of such talents as Clude McKay, Jean Toomer,Countee Cullen, Langston

Hughes, Bill Robinson, Florence Wills, Josephine Baker, Ethel Waters, Paul Robeson,

Roland Hyde’s, Arron Douglass, Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith and Duke Ellington. The

celebration of race consciousness in the novels of New Negroes is conveyed by the concept

of ancestralism. The concept of ancestralism is also apparent in the Negritude movement.

Negritude writers refused to continue their difference with the white gods of European

culture. They sought to destroy the myth of white supremacy and decided to resurrect the

beauty of blackness to foster self-pride and to win respect for cultural pluralism and human

equality.

Afro-American writers feel that it is their job to recover the annihilated history. Toni

Morrison also does not remain aloof from this trend of recovering history and family secrets

through adventurous, mythic characters. Her novels are historical novels that deal with the

exploration of history of American slavery, emancipation, migration

and integration. Morrison’s fictions draw a reliable picture of Afro-American community and

its culture. The work unearths the reality of the oppression of the white over the blacks and

the myth which gives early history of Afro- American race. Morrison’s fiction does not fit

well to the single category. It blends the themes of race, class, coming–age–stories, mythical

and realistic genres.

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Toni Morrison is the first Afro-American writer to win Nobel Prize for literature in 1993.

Toni Morrison who profoundly uses fictive narratives to transfigure the old south – the

bedrock of black dehumanization, degradation and sorrow into an archetypal black homeland,

a cultural womb that lays a claim to history’s orphaned, defamed and disclaimed African

children. Morrison uses black agency and power in fables to describe African Americans who

survive, transcend and create environmental hostilities and socially imposed liabilities.

Morrison humanizes black characters in fictions that strive to overcome and excavate

enforced invisibility of the African American’s social reality. Characters in her novels have

intimate affinity with their ancestors who underwent hardships, enslavement and racist

oppression.

Toni Morrison won National Book Critics Circle Award, The American Academy and

Institute of Arts and Letters Award for her work The Song of Solomon in 1977. The Song

of Solomon was the first Afro- American novel to be included in Book-of the-Month-Club.

The Song of Solomon is basically a story about discovering family name and the entire

black heritage of Milkman Dead. Milkman Dead, the central character in the novel has lost

his name and his ancestry .It shows the importance of historical reality of Afro-Americans.

Morrison’s characters often seek to immerse with their African roots. The physical and

cultural shape of African Americans inhabit expanded during the time of emancipation,

migration and integration. They have to negotiate their relationships with their cultural pasts

and the separate cultural traditions constantly.

The tension between blacks and whites is exemplified by Guitar’s hatred of white and

his decision to join 'The Seven Days'. Morrison's depiction of 'Dead' family in the novel

demonstrates the incompatibility of assumption and demands the life of American

communities. Milkman Dead's quest criticizes the faith in self-sufficiency and individual

identity. Through Milkman Dead's story Morrison questionsthe conceptions of individualism

and offers destabilized construction of identity.

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 Race is a cultural, political and economic concept not a biological one. Racial identity

is the one in which one person is searching his own identity. Many people around the world

are influenced by more than one culture or race. Many of them will pick one that they can

relate to the best. In Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon the theme of identity is inherent. It

tells the story of Milkman Dead who is on a journey to find out his own identity. At the very

beginning of the novel Milkman derives his own identity from extreme vanity and a

masculine sense of entitlement. However, in his journey, with the help of the aunt, Pilate, he

endures a process which allows him to discard his false ideas about himself and to adopt

healthier attitudes regarding himself and the people around him. His aunt Pilate provides self-

knowledge that Milkman sets to attain. She is the only character who lives her life by an

axiom of truth. The rest of Toni Morrison’s characters live under false pretenses which create

in them.

In Song of Solomon, Milkman is able to overcome the array of lies that surrounds

him to become a truly authentic person. He begins to realize the errors in his false

assumptions about himself and sets out a journey towards authenticity. He begins his journey

as a quest for gold. However, he ends it by uncovering a type of wealth very different from

the kind he originally sought. Though he undertakes a physical journey he sets out on a

spiritual and emotional journey towards self-knowledge. While on his journey Milkman

began to learn about his heritage. He came to know about his great- grandfather Solomon, a

figure of local legend who flew away one day leaving his wife and children behind. At first

Milkman was fascinated about by the idea that his ancestor had the power to fly. Milkman

realize that the power of flight is meaningless and the importance of people around him when

a lady raised a question on his journey. She raises a question“ Who’d he leave

behind?”(Morrison 328). When he finds his true self he begins to value human relationships

over money, power and himself.

Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon isa tale of lies, misinterpretations and false identities.

All of its characters true identities remain unknown even to themselves. With the exception

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of Pilate all the characters struggle with identity including the central character Milkman.

With Pilate’s guidance Milkman is able to overcomethalis that surround the falseness with

which he has once represented himself. The novel ends asMilkman reaches self-knowledge

and finds real meaning in his life.

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 Chapter II
The Quest of Racial Identity in Song of Solomon:

Toni Morrison is said to be influenced by Ralph Ellison. Charles Johnson says that

Morrison is a direct descendent of Ralph Ellison in style and sensibility. Afro-America

literature and the ways in which the Afro-American were fleeted in America, their African

past, their myth and oral tradition and above all their struggle to live and exist as the white

American in America are the tools and materials for Toni Morrison’s literary output. Her

works are the reflection of what she saw and endured when she was a child and student in

America, she heard so many stories from her parents which later reflected in the forms of

mature writing. Her work as an editor in Random House polished her image and ideas as a

prominent writer. Her writing is the product of abundant research and enough study of her

ancestors. Nollie McKay says: “In life and art, the outstanding achievements of writer Toni

Morrison extended enlarge the tradition of the strength, persistence, and accomplishments of

black women in America”(396) .

Toni Morrison is a major twentieth century black woman writer. The prominent elements of

her works are black music, black language, and the myths and rituals of black culture. She

has strong connection with the ancestors because they were culture bearers. She feels it is the

black writer’s responsibility to discover the history. She says:

You have to take it out and identify those who have preceded you – summoning them,

acknowledging them in just one step in that process of reclamation so that they are

always there as the confirmation and theaffirmation of the life that I personally have not

lived but is the life of that organism to which I belong which is black people in this

country. (Davis 413)

The language of Morrison’s fictions is distinctive, effortless, suggestive,

and provocate. It is the language black people love to play with the function of the language.

Morrison in her novels badly reveals the silence and undermines the presuppositions,

assumptions, hierarchies and oppositions upon which American hegemonic discourse

depends. He legitimizes the oppression of the black people and the poor. She explores the
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complex social circumstances which demes the black identity and freedom in America within

which they live out their lives. Toni Morrison critiques main stream fictions that

systematically distort the African American’s presence in contribution to the American

literature. She claims that whiteness is mute, meaningless, and pointless.

Toni Morrison’s first novel The Bluest Eye(1970) contrasts the experience and values of

two black families, Macteers and Breedloves and much these of the Shirley Temple of white

Fisher family. The major focus is on the eleven-year-old girlPacola Breedlove, Macteer

sisters, ten-year-old Frieda and nine-year-old Claudia, the narrator. The ideal experience of

white world and the actual experience of black people is portrayed in the novel. God has

miraculously given her the bluest eyes she prayed for after being raped by her drunken father.

She suffers a miscarriage and being ridiculed by other children and Pacola loses her sanity.

At the end of the story, Pacola is shown as determined to achieve beauty and acceptance by

acquiring blue-eyed never succeeds.

Morrison’s second novel Sula (1973) is about the theme friendship of two black girls.

Nel Wright follows the pattern of life which the society has laid for her and others follow

Sula Peace and try to create her own pattern to achieve her own self. It is not only about Nel

Wright and Sula Peace but also about the cultures that spawn there. The tale about the

friendship between Nel Wright and Sula Peace is integrally related to the survival of their

community. Toni Morrison’s third novel, Song of Solomon(1977), basically drawn upon the

concern for the quest for identity of a blade family, which is disinherited and has lost its name

is black America. Morrison presents her concern for African Americans and their black

tradition which is disregarded in America. She tries to advocate the existence and freedom

black Americans.

Morrison’s use of African ways of storytelling and oral forms is a way of bridging

gaps between black community’s folk roots and black American literary tradition. Morrison

questions the western conception and ways of interpretation other than those imposed by the

determinant culture. Morrison uses Afro-American culture, values. Characteristics and

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communities in Song of Solomon is an alternative to mainstream assimilation. Morrison

transforms the Euro-centric cultural discourse through the acceptance of African heritage.

Morrison is seen as the Afro-centric storyteller placing African ideals as the center. She

examines it to expose what has been hidden by dominant discourse in Song of Solomon.

The most important theme in Song of Solomon is not the assimilations of Afro-

American culture and Afro-American descendants into the mainstream culture but the search

for alternative identity and existence. It is not of escaping from slavery andviolence through

supernatural flight of the protagonist but the acceptance of reality and the acceptance of the

condition of the Afro-American life in America. Milkman Dead, the protagonist does not fly

away and escape the challenge of life but he undergoes the various circumstances of finding

the true family history and identity and accepts it as the reality.

Morrison gives the major roles to women in her first two novels,The Bluest Eye and

Sula, whereas she gives major role to male protagonist only in Song of Solomon. Though it has

got the male protagonist, women play the significant roles in finding out the identity of

Milkman Dead throughout his quest. Especially Pilate Dead, Milkman Dead’s aunt, becomes

the major assistance to Milkman. Pilate is magicallyassists milkman’s mother Ruth foster to

restart the sexual relation with Macon Dead after so many years of cold relation and that

resulted in Milkman’s birth.

She gave me funny things to do. And some greenish-grey grassy looking stuff to

put in his food” Ruth laughed, “I felt like doctor, like a chemist doing some big

important scientific experiment. It worked too. Macon came to me for four days.

He even came home from his office in the middle of the day to be with me. He

looked puzzled but, he came. Then it was over. And two months later I was

pregnant.(125)

Morrison offers the cultural knowledge and Black-American’s African traditions and

heritage. Pilate sings folk-songs of Sugar Man or Solomon’s escape at Milkman’s birth. This

song becomes the key to milkman’s quest and illustrates the function of the African

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American women in passing on stories to future generations. Milkman’s relationship to Pilate

turns to major step towards finding his identity and past.

Milkman’s father stands as the middle class black man, whose worry is to acquire

more property and become respected in the white dominated society. He believes in material

possession. He says to Milkman, “own things and let the things you own other things. Then

you will own yourself and other people too” (55). Macon Dead believes that Ownership is the

only means to defend him in the white world.

Guitar Bains tries to response radically to the injuries caused by the white world. He

is the victim of white as his father was sliced in a saw mill. The white owner offer candy to

console his mother and the children. He decides to join the Seven Days, a secret agency

which choose the violent way to take revenge against white. The Seven Day’s action is

depended on the action of whites. The conduct of their lives is determined by the killing of

particular black people by certain white anyhow they are killed. Their motto is to kill the

white in a similar way.

There is a society. It’s made up of a few men who are willing to take some risks.

They don’t initiate anything; they don’t even choose. They are an indifferent as

lain but when a Negro child, Negro woman, or Negro man is killed by whites and

nothing is done about it by thus lay and their courts, this society selects a similar

victim at random, and they execute him or her in a similar manner if they can .If

the negro was hanged, They hang; if a Negrowas burnt, they burn; raped and

murdered, they rape and murder.. They call themselves the seven days… I am one

of them now. (154-155).

Milkman Dead’s identity is a mass of fragments. The search for gold becomes reason for

family history and African heritage.Milkman’s search starts from his grandfather’s farm in

Pennsylvania; he returns to the world of the slaves made the south. Milkman’s trip leads him

to an understanding of himself, his family and culture. Milkman’s concept of rural life differs

extensively when he visits his grandfather’s community in Pennsylvania. He hears the

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stories about his family heritage and realizes the strength of his culture. He has paid little

attention to it in the past.

Milkman’s journey to south is a learning experience for him as he coins together the

different stories and love of his family. The role of oral tradition in Afro-American culture

has significant relevance in Song of Solomon. Milkman’s history is not a recorded one, but

remembered and recollected by different people. He hears the children singing the Solomon’s

song in Shalimar, Virginia. He deciphers the children song and finds in it the narrative of his

family. It is a folktale of flying African Solomon, who flies from slavery and return to his

African home. He left behind twenty one children including Jack, Milkman’s grandfather.

The fragments of the past become the coherent family story through which Milkman finds

himself identified. Milkman can achieve identity with Solomon or Shalimar the flying

African.

The identity of Milkman Dead and his family was dislocated in the history by a white

man’s error while registering the name of his grandfather as Macon dead after he becomes a

freeman. “His own parents, in some mood of perverseness or resignation, had agreed to abide

by a naming done to them by somebody who couldnot have cared less. Agreed to take and

pass on to all their issue this heavy name scrawled in perfect thoughtlessness by a drunken

Yankee in the union Army”.(18)

Milkman Dead bears his name as ‘Milkman’ when he is founding socking his mother’s

milk by Freddie’s, “He’d found the phrax he’d been searching for a milkman that what you

got here, miss Rufie. A natural milkman if ever “seen one”.(14-15) Milkman has to reconnect

his family history and his own identity, which is disinherited. Morrison’s female characters

have significant roles in passing the Afro-American Oral tradition. It has the especial

relevance with pilot, Circe and Susan Byrd in the novel. When Milkman hears the Solomon’s

song, he finds himself connected to it and thus he finds his real name and heritage, his past

family line and his identity.

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Milkman’s grandfather escapes the burdens of slavery and responsibility by leaving twenty-

one children behind him. Milkman accepts the situation as real and inevitable. He learns that

he must look backward in order to look forward and he must remember the past in order to

know the future. “For now he knows what Shalimar knew; if you surrendered the air, you

could ride it”(337).Morrison tries to establish the alternative reality of Afro-African’s

existence in America by showing Milkman’s acceptance not to escape the present like his

ancestors. The American nation of African people is without identity and has white

hegemony, Black Manhood and Double jeopardy of women.

Afro-American writing is the outcry against the white hegemony. Most of the Afro-

American writers strive to make their equal position in the white hegemonic society. White

are always considered as the first class citizens where as blacks areseen as second class

human beings in America. Song of Solomon which is dependanheavily on cultural practices and

tradition of black people is the result of white’s suppression on blacks even after they became

free. Milkman Dead discovers his grandparents real name and find out that ancestry is the

way to find out his own identity and for the achievement of manhood. Milkman must

overcome “Dead” in order to live as an independent man. The name Solomon is the reminder

of white wordy control over black people because the name is the result of a white mission.

Agreed to take and pass on to all their issue, this heavy name scrawled

in perfect thought lessons by a drunken yamkec in the union army. A literal

slip of the end handed to his father on a piece of a paper and which to handed

on to his only son, and his son likewise handed on to his; Macon deed who

begin at secondMacon Dead who married to Ruth Foster (dead) and Deyat

Magdalene called here Dead and First Corinthian dead and (when he least

expected it) another Macon Dead, now know to the part of the world that

mattered as Milkman Dead (18).

Even though Guitar Bairs had not seen up north for long, “he had just begun to learn

that he could speak up to white people”.(7) Guitar ingenuous response to the nurse is

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transformed into a bitter hatred of whites. He recounts the terrible accidental death of his

father and the employer’s gesture of modifying the family by offering them candy. The

gesture sickens the boy Guitar and influence his decisions to join the Seven Days in their

commitment to an equivalent vengeance against white, commonly for each black person

killed by a white.

A recent killing is reported in the barbershop where people discuss that work to be of

Winnie Ruth Jude, a white woman who kills and dismembers her victims and periodically

escapes from the state hospital. For the black men, she serves as a sign of lunacy of whites

who can kill for no good reason. “Winnie Ruth a convicted murderer, who axed and

dismembered her victims and stuffed them in trunks, was committed to a state asylum for the

criminally insane and escaped two or three times each year”(99)Guitar hatred of white people

and conviction to equalize the death caused by whites is the conflict of black and white and

the philosophy of whites to seethe blacks as socially other. Guitar says; “There are no

innocent white people, because every one of them is potential nigger killer, if not the actual

and “white people are unnatural. As a race they are unnatural. And it takes a strong effort of

the will to overcome in unnatural enemy”(155-156).

Morrison’s use of the impact of the white hegemonic culture has a special attention in

the novel. Macon Dead’s love of property, his materialistic vision and wishto become a

prestigious red estate owner is the impact of white’s culture. Macon Dead’s quest is the

consequence of materialism. He comes to understand the values of land especially after he

has seen the white men violently assume control over his father’s farm. He is interested in

land on which houses can be built the house and the gold. He becomes materialistic for

manhood. He hates Pilate because her refusal to exact conventional faminity. He asks her

“why can’t you class like a woman”(28) .He thinks his relation with his sister endangers his

relationship to the white bankers, “He trembled with a thought of the white men in the bank

the men who helped him buy and mortgage houses discovering that lagged bootlegger was

his sister”(28). It becomes important for him to take control over properly and he does not

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want thebankers to discover “That the propertied Negro who handled this business lives

in a big house on Not Doctor Street and had a sister who had a daughter but no husband, and

that daughter had a daughter but no husband”.(20).

He wants to take advantage from Ruth’s father and dreams to become a big landlord.

But when he fails to do. So he mistreats his wife and becomes indifferent to her. He insist his

son Milkman Dead to possess the property to be a man, a dignified man is the society.

Milkman can only verify his identity through the accumulative of property. “Own things, and

let the things you own other things. The you’ll own yourself and other people to”(55). Macon

Dead’s drive for property influences Milkman Dead to steal the seek of gold, which they

think Pilate has been carrying. Carolyn Denard says “who they are measured by what they

have, the material resources they can bring in the process manhood become all important,

which leads to men like Macon Dead and Guitar to violence”(71).

Milkman undertakes a quest for gold because of his work with the Seven days. The

Seven Days have chosen violence as a way to avenge on white in order to establish black’s

existence in American. The position of women in Morrison novels is doubly difficult. Black

women in Morrison’s novels discover that they are neither white nor male, and all freedom

and triumph are forbidden to them. Womanhood like blackness is another problem in

American society. They are defined by the looks “they are made to feel must real when

seen”(peach31). They are black women in society whose female ideals is a white’s doll baby.

They are defined other and made to be looked as other in the society. Linden peach says,

“Morrison shows the book taking on monstrous propositions as the humiliated black male

allies himself with the third by making the black women the object of his displaced fary”(32).

Morrison in Song of Solomon presents her women character suppressed and

eliminated. Ruth Dead stared for a closeness and affection that can never be found in Macon

Dead. Milkman never regarded her as a person, a separate, individual, with a life apart from

allowing or inter terms with her own(137). Ruth is humiliated and exploited and exploited by

men.

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 Ruth foster, a daughter of the town’s most successful black doctor and wife of one of

its most successful businessman lived as a child in a “great big house that pressed [her] into a

small package”[124] . She resembles the most suppressed woman who finds her own house

like a prison. She is never permitted to do anything on her own will. Macon Dead would

always “parade [them]like virgins through Babylon, then humiliate like whores in

Babylon”(216).

Milkman’s selection with hagai is not a sevens but he takes Hager just as several

partners which he breaks off at Christmas. Hagar cannot bear and attempts to kill him but can

never do so. She dies ultimately. Milkman’s sisters Magdalene and First Corinthian are

always terrified by their father Macon dead and they are never permitted to take decision in

their lives.Even Milkman behaves them with discard. He has never taken condition of their

liver; “he has lived with the family as if they were the strangers. Lena tells him that milkman

her been peeing in the family all over his life”(214). Milkman’s aunt Pilate Dead acts as a

helper to him to find the family history. Pilate Dead is socially outcaste woman who has born

without navel. She suffers a lot of torment in the course of her life and do not have a husband

but adaughter and granddaughters even her own brother hates her for some unknown reason

and tries to stay away from her.

Circe, the maid and midwife, who helps Milkman to find out his identity, plays the

same role as in Homer’s Odyssey. As Homer’s Circe finds his way to Ithaca, Morrison’s

Circe provides crucial information that reconnects Milkman with his family history. In this

way Morrison’s connects Milkman’s past and present. The story runs in the course to direct

one’s family history in order to trace the hidden past and reconnect the family with the

patriarchal line of milkman dead. Morrison’s depiction of black women is for the suffering,

brutality and living reality of American society where black women have to suffer more than

anybody else, which is the experience of Morrison herself.

One of the major tools for Afro-American writers is the use of Myth and invention of

playful verbal twists, Black English. Vernacular relay as strong identify marker which

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constitutes a strong oral tradition in their literacy work. Myths are both created and recreated

to escape from the white American society which denies the presence of blacks and their

freedom. Black writers create myths to gratify their streams of being free and equal in

America. Myth, legend and rituals are cultural codes for communally sanctioned attitudes,

beliefs and behavior. They are ideally suited for novelists in search of appropriate signs and

forms to reconstruct the socialized are ambivalence for the shifting, conflicting emotions of

love and hate. Social oppression of Black American life and society foster shame and pride.

Bernard w. Bell says.

The Afro-American literacy consciousness was developed in America in

19thcentury after two hundred year of oppression and violence. The afro American

writers’ major literary resources, then, became the stories of their father and

forefathers in oral forms. These stores transformed from one generation of people

to the next, which include their experiences of torments and brutality as slaves

which they were unable to escape. The black writer feels that they recall that oral

tradition and remain true to their bore fathers as Ton Morrison says that she feels

strong connection to ancestors.(McKay 398)

Song of Solomon is based on several myths of flying. It opens with mythic light of Robert

smith, an insurance agent who marks a miraculous birth of Milkman Dead. “The next day a

colored baby was born inside mercy for the first time. Mr. Smiths blue silk wings must have

left their mark”(9). Milkman’s life follows pattern of the classic hero from his miraculous

birth and his guest to final unionwide the ancestor. The mythic journey emphasizes the

eventual assimilation of the hero into history. Milkman great grandfather flew away to Africa

leaving his children behind him”. He is the myth of “flying African”. Morrison transforms the

moments of coming to grips with slavery as an allegory of liberation” (Gates and

Appiah316).

Milkman’s story has relevance with the Icarus myth since it ties with folk tales of

blacks flying back to home land. Morrison in context of flying myth inSong of Solomonsays,

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“if it meansIcarus to some readers, fine, I want to take credit of that but my meaning is

specific; if is about black people who could fly. My hate was always part of the folklore of

my life flying was one of all gifts” (Lecliar 372).

The story of Daedalus flying away and trying to take away his son, Shalimar or

Solomon tried to take away his son but he drops unable to protect him because he is a baby.

This version emphasizes that the fall is the result of a situation beyond his control and father

desire to get freedom on one hand and family on the other hand. Morrison’s analyses and

reconstruction of myth is important. In the lcarus tale freedom is available to the characters.

They can fly but fail because they want an impossible kind of freedom. Icarus attempt to

break free of the earth overestimating his non potential. He neglects his father’s guidance and

his wings are melted by masculine symbol, the sun. He falls back into the sea, which is

described as the feminine symbol of change and rebirth. Thus the Icarian mythic pattern is

one of personal quest and egocentric. It is to test individualist potential.

It is a flight in a double sense: a flight from authority and flight towards freedom. It is

also a flight which ends the situation of the black American whose want to become totally

free which is impossible.They must accept their interior position. Shalimar is free to return to

Africa. But his freedom has a particular context. He has wife and twenty one children. “He

wasn’t only the son. They were twenty others. But he was the only one Solomon tried to take

with him. May be that what it means? He lifted him but dropped near the perch of the

baghouse”(323). He wounds others because everyone cannot understand what he does. The

conflict is between freedom and social responsibility. Milkman resolved that conflict when he

leaps flying towards his brother to find freedom. He does not accept the situations as right or

suitable butas real.

African-American cultural memories and their meaning are passed down orally

through the generation. This is how the children of south, who may never have been to the

south, are made familiar in the culture’s legacies. When Macon Dead attempts to tell his son

what a man is to, he offers the story of his daddy’s Pennsylvanian farm, “Lincoln’s

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Heaven”.(51) Milkman was born and brought up in the north. He realizes the lessons of

grandmother to his father to work hard, to love and respect family and to be responsible

steward of nature was the black’s codes of conducts and conceptions of good life.

Milkman’s success is couched in verbal terms. Words are not only key to his

individual, familial, communal and racial integration but words are oral rather than written.

While pursuing gold and power, Milkman happens to hear many stories about his ancestors in

the south. The historical significances attached in the stories become important for Milkman

to find out his ancestors. He hears the testimony of Reverend Cooper and the fragments of the

past provider by Circle and Susan Byrd and finally listens to the children singing Solomon’s

song. . To decipher the words he wants to write them down first but lacking paper and penal,

he is forced to memorize them:

“He would just have to listen and memorize it. He closed his eyes and

concentrated while the children, inexhaustible in their willingness to repeat

arrhythmic, rhyming action game, performed the round over and over again. And

milkman memorized all of what they sang.” (303)

Just before Pilate death Milkman shows his full participation in the Afro-American oral

tradition. He sings the song of Solomon, adopting it appropriately for her, “Sugargirl don’t

leave me here cotton ball to choke me sugargirl don’t leave mehere Buckra’s arms to yoke

me”.(336) The African American issues of place, past, identity and culture are inseparable

from the oral tradition. It includes the oral stories, songs, jokes, proverbs and other cultural

products that have not been written down. Most Afro-Americans migrated to north to escape

their slave past and domination and gave up their southern rural ways to adjust in a new

place. They brought the southern oral tradition with them. Morrison’s depiction of middle

class black family ‘Dead’ in song of Solomon, has very important link with oral tradition and

it becomes the major gateway to reveal the buried past of Dead family.

Toni Morrison in“Afro-American presence in American Literature”says, “Silences are being

broken, lost things have been found and at least two generations of scholars are disentangling

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received knowledge from the apparatus of control most notably those who are engaged in

investigation of American slave narratives, and the delineation of the Afro- American literary

tradition.(Bloom 208).The inferior identity of blacks in American society has forced the black

writers to maintain and to show their presence in America. Their literary products have

to refute the western views on Afro-American literature that as Morrison says; There is no

Afro- American (or third world) art, it exists but is inferior and is superior when it measures

up to the “universal” criteria of western art .He also says that it is not so much ‘art” as one-

rich are – that requires a western or Eurocentric smith to refine it from its “neutral” state into

an aesthetically complex term Morrison’s attempt in her literary works is to reverse the

western notion of identity of blacks as inferior and advocate the importance of Afro-

American’s cultureand heritage. Milkman Dead’s quest never gives the alternative solution to

the lost family name and its African roots inSong of Solomon.

The identity of Milkman’s family has been lost and they acquired the title ‘Dead’ by

an American soldier. They are compelled to accept this name as “Dead” because their family

line has been cutoff. Milkman is almost without identity. Milkman’s birth was not wanted by

his father and he forces his mother to abort but with the help of Pilate milkman came into

theworld. “I was pregnant. When he found out about it he immediately suspected plate and he

told me to get rid of the baby. But I wouldn’t and Pilate helped me stand him off. I

wouldn’t have been strong enough without her. She saved my life. And yours. Macon she

saved yours too” Milkman becomes the battleground for Macon and Ruth and later on

he becomes the means for his mother’s gratification. Milkman does not have his own self;

“His deformity was mostly in his mind”. He is totally excluded from his family and becomes

the tool for others.

He feels that he is used by everybody for his or her satisfaction. Milkman’s friend

Guitar Bains constructs an identity for himself that focuses on racial politics, “I suppose you

know that white people kill black people for time to time. And folks shake their heads and

say, Eh, eh, eh, isn’t that a shame?”. He is not interested in personal history. His relationship

22 | P a g e
to his past is less intricate that milkman’s relationship to his own past. He uses his past in the

south in terms of struggle. Wahneema Lubiano in “The postmodernist Rag. Political identity and

vernacular in Song of Solomon”says that “Guitar devotes his whole lifeplacing himself. In

opposition to whites-evening up the numbers- and so creates for himself and appositionally

defined identity”. Guitar is known as a hunter. He remembers his childhood only in term

of hunting. One of his few memories of the south is his memory of killing an old doe.

He says, “I was a natural-born hunter,. I saw it was doe. Not a young one; she was

old, but she was still a doe. I felt... Bad” He becomes against hunting at the end of the text

when he kills another old doe, Pilate. “She stood up then. And it seemed to milkman that he

heard the shot after she fellSong of Solomonimplies the unresolved problems of identity

caused by the construction of self, cultural and political identity under the influence of

oppression. The naming of Not Doctor Street and No mercy Hospital is the rejection of

white’s suppression by the blacks and their alternative identity. The locations like Not

Doctor Street and No Mercy Hospital where black people were denied admittance are forms

of counter negation of the white world that delimits the black one.

The hero’s birth at No Mercy hospital is itself and allegorical representation of the

personal. Political and historical complexities of the construction of identity Mr. smith’s

flight from Mercy to “other side of lake Superior” symbolizes that blacks find it difficult to

exist in American society and have to escape “the other side” of lake superior is Canada,

the place for which escaping slaves leaving the mercy of Euro-American’s alleged

civilization-the rationale for slavery Morrison’s epigraph to the novel read, ‘for father may

soar and the children may know their names’ but it is finally also the names of ancestral

mothers which hear witness. Pilate’s name is selected by the family custom of placing a

finger on the first word in an opened Bible. Even the young Milkman knows that Pilate’s box

contains the magic knowledge of all names. “Pilate knows. It’s in that dumb-ass box hanging

from her ear.

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 Her own name and everybody else” . Pilate carries her name with her just as she

carries a rock from every state in which she has lived to provide continuity in random and

dispossessed existence. Milkman begins his journey to south to retrieve the gold that his

father and Pilate has found years ago in a cave in Pennsylvania. Macon believes that Pilate

stole gold from him. A set of teachers and helpers introduces the South to him. Here the quest

for gold becomes the quest for identify in Danville Pennsylvania. Milkman meets reverend

Cooper who provides important information about his ancestry. He gives Milkman a sense

that he is included in a larger Dead family. He greets Milkman with “I know you people”

and tells him the story of his grandfather’s murder and of Circe’s caring for Pilate and Macon

in the days to follow. Circe, Milkman’s second helper in the south tells Milkman how to find

the cave where Macon thinks gold still lies.

But she also provides information about milkman’s ancestors that he will later use the

Solomon song sung by the children in Shalimar Circle and tells him in that about

grandmother. An Indian named Sing came with his grandfather to Pennsylvania from

Virginia and she tells him the town’s nameis Charlemagne. She also knows that old Macon’s

body has been dumped in the very cave in which gold was discovered. “Must have been

hunter’s cave Hunters sued it to rest up in there sometimes Eat Smoke Sleep that where they

dumped old Macon’s body”. And later milkman with realize that it is her father’s bones that

Pilate hasfound when she has returned to the cave. Finally, she reveals his grandfather’s real

name is Jake. “Jake I believe. “Jake, what? “She shrugged, a Shirley Temple, little-girl-

helpers shrug “Jake was all she told me”. Milkman’s trip through the woods to the butler’s

house and to the cave is part of his initiation.

Going into the Pennsylvania woods Milkman is oblivious to the universe of wood like

he has been oblivious to the emotions and experiences of the people around him. To find the

cave he has to go deeper into the woods and climb rock hillside. In the confrontation with

nature Milkman finds that some genuine feeling begins to emerge. “Milkman began to shake

with hunger. Heal hunger, nit the less then top-full feeing he was accustomed to, the nervous

24 | P a g e
desire to taste something good. Real hunger”. Milkman still has much to learn when he

reaches Shalimar. He began to take southern hospitality for granted. He has the feel at home

in the south especially when his car breaks down in front of Solomon’s Country store in

Shalimar. Milkman hears the local children singing “a kind a ring-around-the rosy or little

sally walker game”. This is the Solomon song which Milkman later realizes the key to the

mastery of his ancestry. In the hunt Milkman hear the wailing from Ryan’s Gulch, and Calvin

tells him about the old legend that “a woman named Ryna is crying in there” .

The Ryan who has been abandoned by his great-grandfather. Solomon. “ItsSolomon

she’s crying for, not the baby”, Milkman begins to gain access to the mysteriesof his

ancestry. The Solomon’s songs which he hears become very important for him which

synthesizes the different fragments of stories he has got in different places. In children’s song

he deciphers the power of his great- grandfather, Solomon who has flown and flew back to

Africa leaving behind his wife Ryna and twenty onechildren with Milkman’s grandfather

Jake. Milkman recognizes the version of Sugarman done fly away” . He has heard Pilate

singing that song all her life. He ealizesSusan Byrd is his grandmother’s niece. She confirms

and tells Milkman the secret of Solomon. He was flying to African and he tried to carry his

young child Jake with him but has to let him fall. Jake was Milkman’s grandfather who

changed his name to Macon Dead. By leaving his ancestor’s name Milkman has learned who

he is. Here Milkman completes the quest for finding out his identity which was buried into

the past. At last Milkman and Pilate return to the cave in Pennsylvania so that Pilate can

properly bury what she now knows is her father’s bones, “ That was you father you found.

You have been carrying you father bones- all this time” . Guitar track them down and

believes that Milkman has found the gold and betrayed him by cutting him out of his share.

As Milkman and Pilate stand at the cave, Guitar shots Pilate with a bullet which is meant for

Milkman. Milkman stands up fully expecting to be killed instantly and calls to Guitar

shouting “over here brother man! Can you see me? Here I am” . Guitar is still his “brother”

and if Guitar needs his life Milkman can give it. The novel ends with Milkman’s words,

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Without wiping away the tears, taking a deep breath, or even bending his knees-he leaped. As

fleet and bright as a lodestar he wheeled toward Guitar and it did not matter with one of them

would give up his ghost in the killing arms of his brother. For now he knew what Shalimar

know if you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.Milkman recovers his dislocated identity

by recognizing himself and his connection to his family and the whole Afro-American race.

He gets relieved from the pain of being nameless and ignored by the whites’ American

hegemonic society. Morrison, in an interview with Christina Davis says, “the quality of

Milkman’slife has improved so much and he is complete and capable that the length of it is

irrelevant really. It is not about dying or not dying. It’s just that this marvelous epiphanyhas

taken place”.

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Chapter IIIConclusion

The Afro-American writing is a series of attempts by Afro-Americans to attain a

specific recognizable identity and gain certain kind of respect in the larger American society.

When the blacks in earlier era of their experience in America began to feel that they must

come out of the burdens of slavery, racial discrimination, political exclusion and economic

exploitation. They began to explore and record in their literary products their dream of being

free and respectable American citizens. Black American writers frequently felt and continue

to feel that it is their responsibility to deconstruct and reverse the black American’s identity.

The African-American writers try to understand and reconcile the tensions in their

consciousness that resulted from color, class and gender conflicts between white American

culture and the descendants of slaves in America. The major theme of African-American

literature from the very beginning to the contemporary period is structured in the loss of

black American identity and marginalized black American voice.

The Afro-American literature is for black people’s selfhood, security and power.

Their art speaks the need and aspirations of black American people. The African-American

writers are the passionate observers of black people’s struggle for freedom, race violence,

and all kinds of oppression and marginalization, which they use as their major tools for their

literary products. Their use of myth, invention of playful verbal twists shows the powerful

resources of Black English Vernacular as strong identity marker, which constitutes a strong

oral traditionand black American rural tradition. It becomes the medium where they feel

themselvesidentified.

The African-American writers eschew the burdens of white oppression and torments

of slavery and its aftermath. The output of African-American writing discloses the desperate

struggle of black people to survive and secure the most basic rights and freedom in a hostile

environment. The black literary product is about the troubled quest of black American

identity and liberty, the agony of social exclusion and a longing for a respect as a free human

being. Whites can act and blacks can only react in the American society. The blacks have

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always become the objects in the Americanhistory. The struggle of black American writers is

to make black people as the real subjects of their country.

They reconnect themselves with their folk-roots, rural past and oral tradition by which

they measure themselves as people having rich cultural tradition. The slave culture, myth, the

pain and pathos of black people in America are the vital parts of African-American literary

tradition. African-American’s identity revolves around the ‘Look’. Blackness is defined

always by the eyes of whites. Black American’s identity is framed in relation to whiteness.

The dilemma of self-identity for many black writers is inseparable from the racialized

American society, which denies and violates black’s recognizable identity.

The African-American literature transforms what has been significantly absent in the

narrative of American cultural history – the exploitation and denial of black cultural identity.

Toni Morrison is widely read throughout the world. Morrison creates what she calls ‘village

literature’. She owes much to her ancestors and feels that African-American writers have to

honor them. She strongly opposes the mainstream notion of African-American having

inferior position and existence and seeks to find the alternative identity of blacks in America.

She is not the exception of African-American trend of writing, which is heavily depended on

the vernacular culture, oral tradition, myth, folklore and the depiction of African-Americans

experience under the suppression and violence of white American superiority in the slavery

and aftermath.Morrison subverts the hierarchy by saying there is no question of being hit

superior and black inferior. She exposes the silence and undermines the presuppositions,

assumptions, hierarchies, and opposition on which western hegemonic discourse depends.

She brings in her writing African culture and tradition in the center by saying that

whiteness is impossible and mute in its absence. Morrison prefers to be contextualized in

American literature that ceases to repress African-American presence. The history of African-

American novels begins with William Wells Brown’s novelClotelleis considered as the pivotal

book in the history of African-American novels. It focuses on the abolition of slavery in the

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United States. Brown employs realistic details of African-American life inClotelle.Harriet

Wilson’sOur Nig exposes the racial identity of the author.

The novel is autobiographical in nature. OurNig presents the horrific conditions of black

life in America. Wilson shows the exploitation of blacks by the whites. Another novelist of

nineteenth century Martin RobinsonDelanyis considered as the radical spokesman for the

black independence.His own experience in different places for the investigation of

immigration possibilities for free blacks is fictionalized in his novel Blake. E. B. Du Bois, a

distinguished man of letters, explores the values of American democracy, human rights and

attacks the social institutions, which perverted them, in his five novels. These novels explore

the heroic struggle of black Americans during the turbulent years when they were fighting for

their full rights in America. In the history of African-American novels Harlem Renaissance

remains the most productive period. It is the period of the rise of Claude McKay, Countee

Cullen and Langston Hughes.

They sensed the race consciousness in their writings by the concept of ancestralism, a

feeling of connection with one’s ancestors, one’sdescendents.Richard Wright suggests that

black writers of eighteenth and nineteenth century created the literature to impress white and

get more comfortable place in the racial world. Wright’s Native Son, one of best sellers, is a

construction of a racial world shaped by black’s sensitivity. Another significant figure in

African-American novel, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Manmarks the African-American’s

metaphor for their identity invisible in America and they have to rebel against the restraints to

find freedom. Novelists John A. Williams, John Oliver Killens and Gayl Jones also cannot

come out of the periphery of the African-American’s racial world, the world of human

suffering and dreadful situation of people of color in their writings.

They trace the complicated lives of blacks in the white terrorism and the horror stories

of oppressions. Alice Walker, one of the most significant black American novelists, marks

the special position in the history of African-American novels with her Pulitzer Prize winning

novelThe Color Purplein the 1980s. It is about the crucial aspects of race and the experiences of

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blacks in America. Toni Morrison, the most successful novelist of the present time, strongly

feels the sense of her ancestors’ contribution and pays honor to them. Her writing is

the product of her abundant reading and understanding of black culture, black tradition and

black heritage. Her first two novelsThe Bluest EyeandSulaare about the female suppression and

their double jeopardy in the white American society whereas her third novel Song of

Solomon presents a quest for one’s identity in the lost history, which was dislocated. The

protagonist, Milkman Dead, has to suffer the pain of not having his real name. Milkman

symbolizes the black people in America who are leading the inferior life in the white cultural

supremacy. Morrison’s depiction of ‘Dead’ family in the novel demonstrates the

incompatibility of received assumptions and demands the life back in African-American

communities.

The depiction of women is for the living oral tradition of African-American culture

and for the suffering. The ongoing reality of white’s brutality is presented through Guitar

Bain’s hatred and radicalism of the Seven Days. The importance of oral tradition remains

alive though the fragmented stories of ‘Dead’ family told by different people to Milkman

Dead during his quest. The Solomon’s song remains the key point for Milkman to find out his

family history, his identity and family link. Milkman Dead unlike his ancestor, who escaped

from reality and responsibility, finds his real name and accepts it as real in American white

dominatedsociety.

With his family link with Solomon, his great grandfather, Jake, his grandfather, Ryna,

his great grandmother, Milkman gets relieved from the pain of being nameless, entirely

ignored and treated as invisible. Through Milkman’s search for racial identity, Morrison

gives an alternative notion of an individual and thereby explores the respective community’s

self-image.

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BibliographyA . P r i m a r y S o u r c e

Morrison Toni.Song of Solomon. New York: Penguin Books, 1987

B.Secondary Sources

Arafat, Afia“Decolonizing Space: Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, Tar Baby

andLove”.The Indo-American Review.vol.16, 1993:.

Bell, Bernard W.

The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989.

Gates, Henry Louise, Jr

Figures in Black: Words, Signs and the “Racial”Self. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Henry Louise, Jr. and K.A. Appiah, eds

. Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present.

New York: Amistad, 1993.

Kannamal, S. “Man-Woman Dichotomy Untenable: A Post-Structuralist Reading of Toni

Morrison’s Novels”. Indian Journal of American Studies, 1993:.

Krishnan, S. “Racial Memory Drenched in Blood”. Indian Review of Books

,1994

Lander, Susan. “Song of Solomon”.

The New Yorker , 1977.

McKay, Nellie Y. “An Interview with Toni Morrison” in Toni Morrison: Critical

Perspectives Past and Present”.Ed. Henry Louise Gates, Jr. and K.A. Appiah. New York:

Amistad, 1993.Price, Renolds. “Song of Solomon (1977)”,

Puri, Usha. “The Narrative Technique and Oral Tradition in Toni Morrison’s Song

of Solomon”..The Literary Half- Yearlyvol. 38.2, 1997:.

Smith, Valerie. “Song of Solomon: Continuities of Community”,

The New York Book Review, September 11, 1977.Smith, Valerie ed. New Essays on Song of

Solomon. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,1995.

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Sumana, K.

The Novels of Toni Morrison: A Study in Race, Gender, and Class.London: Sangam Books, 1998.

Upot, Sherin. “Cultural Politics in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon”,

Indian Journal of American Studies, summer 1993:

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