The Foreigner as Cultural Orphan

In Morrison’s fiction, deprived of their African culture, most characters appear as the Kristevan foreigner in the racist society of America. In Beloved, the slave-owner Mr. Garner labels his slaves “men” in Sweet Home, in contrast with his

neighbours who bludgeon all black males into “boys.” Reflecting on his life on Sweet Home, the freed slave Paul D says:

Nobody counted on Garner dying. Nobody thought he could. [. . .] Without his life each of theirs fell to pieces. [. . .] Garner called and announced them men – but only on Sweet Home, and by his leave. Was he naming what he saw or creating what he did not? [. . .] [T]hey had been isolated in a won-derful lie [. . .] Protected and convinced they were special. [. . .] [B]eing so in love with the look of the world, putting up with anything and everything, just to stay alive in a place where a moon he had no right to was neverthe-less there. (1997: 220–221, italics mine)

The hope of being treated as men becomes compelling to slaves who have long enough been dehumanized and deprived. Yet Mr. Garner’s “open-mindedness”

actually reflects his psychological need to justify his position as an authoritarian;

securing his sense of self with well-regulated “properties,” he is in fact afflicted with paranoid fears and fantasies. Additionally, branding them as men, he is inca-pable of empowering them to step into the symbolic world; the slaves’ status as men only in Sweet Home paradoxically suggests their role as cultural captives or orphans, serving to confirm Mr. Garner’s superior status as a successful, humane slaveholder in America.

After the eighty-six days of shackled existence he spends on a chain gang, Paul D has difficulty in sustaining a stable relationship: “he didn’t believe he could live with a woman – any woman – for over two out of three months” (1997: 40). It is apparent that he has fallen prey to the lingering horror of slavery, which functions in part by fracturing human intimacy:

After Delaware and before that Alfred, Georgia, where he slept under-ground and crawled into sunlight for the sole purpose of breaking rock, walking off when he got ready was the only way he could convince himself that he would no longer have to sleep, pee, eat or swing a sledge hammer in chains. (1997: 40)

Evidently Paul D is trying to fly from a life of inhuman bondage and subjugation.

Correspondingly, Elizabeth Kella reads Paul D’s emotional detachment as a com-pulsive symptom: “his compensatory assertion of individuality and free will through travel is figured as a gendered symptom of this trauma” (2000: 137). On the other hand, he is constantly haunted by his origin, especially after the frag-mentation of Sweet Home: “Once, in Maryland, he met four families of slaves who had all been together for a hundred years: great-grands, grands, mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles, cousins, children. Half white, part white, all black, mixed with Indian” (Morrison 1997: 219). The extended family made up of people of varying complexions awakens Paul D’s feeling of being emasculated and

or-phaned by systemic violence. His solitary journey is therefore driven by a gnaw-ing sense of foreignness, which is symbolized by the “tobacco tin buried in his chest where a red heart used to be” (Morrison 1997: 72–73). Naturally, he watch-es the familiwatch-es “with awe and envy, and each time he discovered large familiwatch-es of black people he made them identify over and over who each was, what relation, who, in fact, belonged to who” (1997: 219). His inclination to stay on the move attests to his obsession with an ancestral presence under the family-fracturing strategy of slavery.

In Sula, the eponymous character is psychologically orphaned when overhearing her mother saying to her friends, “You love her, like I love Sula, I just don’t like her” (1982a: 57). It sets her on a journey leading nowhere. In consequence, she figures as the Kristevan foreigner who “has lost [her] mother [. . .] [She] is a dev-otee of solitude” (Kristeva 1991: 5). Deprived of maternal bonding, there is noth-ing left for her, who is reduced to nothnoth-ing and henceforth embarks on a ten-year wandering life to escape isolation and alienation. Put another way, Hannah’s words leave permanent changes in Sula’s psyche, bringing about the latter’s self-exile. In a positive light, Sula’s straying out of the community opens her up to the outside world and contributes to her role as an iconoclast. Always on the move, she engages in riveting one self to another, experimenting with a tentative ego. To analyze her by way of Kristeva’s insight into the foreigner:

[she] has no self. Barely an empty confidence, valueless, which focuses [her]

possibilities of being constantly other, according to others’ wishes and to circumstances. I do what they want me to, but it is not “me” – “me” is else-where, “me” belongs to no one, “me” does not belong to “me,” . . . does

“me” exist? (1991: 8, italics in original)

What Kristeva elaborates here is the sense of unhomeliness that mercilessly tor-ments the foreigner. Sula’s status as the foreigner stems from the collapse of Hannah as a selfobject inside her. Not surprisingly, as her life is about abjection – abjecting her family, her mother and even her double Nel – so too her life jetti-sons as much as possible to make way for an eerie spatial and temporal border-land, between inside and outside, beginning and end, life and death.

Returning to the Bottom community, Sula drifts from one relationship to another, readily projecting herself onto other people. Free of orders and borders, she aban-dons herself to insolent happiness and sexual promiscuity, and her scandalous excesses symbolize her breaking loose from familial and linguistic shackles. Ar-guably, Sula’s excessive sexual desire suggests her unwillingness to part with the maternal body; alternatively, it suggests her newly-achieved freedom qua for-eigner. Escaping maternal imprisonment, the foreigner is intoxicated with “a

spe-cial, somewhat insolent happiness” which “seems to prevail, in spite of everything, because something has definitely been exceeded: it is the happiness of tearing away, of racing, the space of a promised infinite” (Kristeva 1991: 4, original ital-ics). Sula represents an intrinsic cultural foreignness, an unbridled freedom as opposed to a state of cultural live burial.

Sula survives the scourge of slavery, reappearing as Beloved in the novel of that name.⁵⁹ Patricia Hunt observes that “the Africans who underwent the horrific sea-change of the Middle Passage are simultaneously historical and spiritual presences” (1993: 443). In light of this, Morrison conspicuously blurs the bounda-ry between life and death, inventing a baby ghost in the flesh to embody the presences, to revive the Sixty Million and more who have lost both their lives and their names across the Middle Passage in this fiction. Nine years after Baby Suggs’ death, Beloved returns in the body of a young woman whose elusive, complex and contradictory identity is integral to our understanding of this novel.

The ghost’s neediness, emotionalism, baby-soft skin and lithe body imply lifetime imprisonment as well as support the hypothesis held by most of the characters that Beloved is the ghost of Sethe’s baby daughter. Moreover, Beloved compli-cates her identity by describing her former dwelling-place as where “there will never be a time when I am not crouching and watching others who are crouching too” (1997: 210). It is a place that is meant to evoke two things: a womb where she is kept small, and a slave ship where there is “nothing to breathe down [. . .]

and no room to move in” (1997: 75). Both the womb (which promises life) and the cellar of the slave ship (which signifies death) relate her to the darkness which marks black people as marginalized, invisible and ugly.

Beloved’s language is strangely incoherent, repetitive, inconclusive and incom-prehensible; her stream of consciousness, with its disjointed phrases and images, corresponds to both a one-year-old child and a trauma victim still trapped in the after-effects of slavery. The provocative, elusive refrain “a hot thing” suggests her incapacity to distinguish her mother from herself, and a face from a location; it

59 Morrison often revises her characters in her fiction. For example, she says in an interview that Beloved reappears as Dorcas in Jazz and the earlier love story is reconfigured in the Harlem milieu (Naylor 1994: 208). In another interview, she points out the affinity between Beloved and Wild in Jazz: “You see a pregnant black woman naked at the end of Beloved. It’s at the same time . . . back in the Gold Gray section of Jazz, there is crazy woman out in the woods.

The woman they call Wild [. . .] could be Sethe’s daughter, Beloved. When you see Beloved towards the end [of Beloved], you don’t know, she is either a ghost who’s been exorcised or she’s a real person [who is] pregnant by Paul D” (qtd. in Whitehead 2004: 156). Accordingly, Whitehead concludes that “Wild is both a wild woman who lives in the woods and the spectra of Beloved not yet laid to rest” (2004: 25–26). For further discussion of Morrison’s work of revision, see Chapter 5.

may literally represent the heat of the ship as well as the hot iron branding Sethe and her children as animals. The visual signifier’s power to proliferate lays claim to the plurality of meanings. Moreover, embedded in “I want her face a hot thing”

(1997: 211) is Beloved’s language of love – the only way a baby knows to depict it: “how can I say things that are pictures” (1997: 210). Her passion for images locates her in the prelinguistic, preoedipal register, and perhaps also to the uncon-scious reenactment of the horrendous scene of infanticide. In short, Morrison uti-lizes the refrain to convey Beloved’s compulsion to tell the story of maternal si-lence and betrayal, to express her death-defying love or desire for her mother.

Beloved remains uncanny, remote and largely silent throughout the novel. Hyster-ical and creeping into the tranquility of reason, she represents what Sethe refuses to recognize as a part of herself under the chattel bondage or after it – the uncanny.

Sethe is traversed by the desire for the Other after Beloved’s reincarnation – what she has repressed or what she was unaware of before. Analyzing the strangeness aroused upon meeting the foreigner, Kristeva writes:

The uncanny strangeness allows for many variations: they all repeat the dif-ficulty I have in situating myself with respect to the other and keep going over the course of identification-projection that lies at the foundation of my reaching autonomy. (1991: 187)

It is apparent that the person’s inability to reconcile himself to the uncanniness of the foreigner suggests his own foreignness. Similarly, throughout most of the novel, Sethe displays an unconscious discontent with living with the foreigner, both inside and outside.⁶⁰ Yet she is reduced to being a foreigner when she cedes whatever she has to Beloved in order to make reparation to the ghost after the latter’s return. As the narrator observes from the angle of Denver, “It was as though her mother had lost her mind, like Grandma Baby calling for pink and not doing the things she used to” (1997: 240). In so doing, Sethe starts a life unfamil-iar to her, surrendering herself entirely to Beloved’s whimsical desires. Finally, she fails to keep up with the role of a good mother when she makes an effort to exonerate herself from blame for the infanticide; on the other hand, Beloved cas-tigates Sethe for it, thus embodying the foreignness which is her unconscious (Kristeva 1991: 183). As a result, Sethe nearly falls apart, registering as a foreign-er travforeign-ersed and tormented by Beloved, who embodies past pain and tforeign-error.

60 The inside foreigner suggests her status as a slave mother; on the other hand, the outside for-eigner is represented by the slave owner as well as her own people, who fail to inform her of the incoming slave catchers.

In Love, Morrison portrays a cluster of women grappling with varying mental diseases such as hysteria, paranoia, neurosis and psychosis. Enthralled by the spectral presence of Cosey, they are doubly castrated by racism and sexism, tragi-cally ensnared and entrapped in the turmoil of past. In this fiction, the deep psy-chological damage done to the black female is first and foremost explored via Christine and Heed, who become possessed with each other’s presence immedi-ately after they meet on the Florida coast:

It’s like that when children fall for one another. On the spot, without intro-duction. [. . .] If such children find each other before they know their own sex, or which one of them is starving, which well fed; before they know col-or from no colcol-or, kin from stranger, then they have found a mix of surrender and mutiny they can never live without. Heed and Christine found such a one. (2004: 231, original italics)

Drawn towards each other with an emotion like “love at first sight” (Wyatt 2008:

212–213), the girls’ fascination with each other finds its origin either in their dys-functional family or their distant mother. What brings them together is a return to the time before the incursion of language. Yet Cosey forces himself into their life, cracking and warping their friendship into a family feud traversing most of their lives. As a dead but dominating patriarch, he impersonates the Lacanian Other, victimizing his kinswomen in the symbolic register. On the other hand, estranged from each other by the foreignness perpetrated on them by the patriarch-perpetrator, the pair identify with him, which conveys their desperate desire for an experience of life despite the horrendous aftershock of slavery.

Patterning their identity upon an imaginary counterpart, Heed and Christine are constricted in their capacity for active engagement with others. Therefore, their relationship proves essentially narcissistic, subject to aggressive elements when-ever they are assailed by aching senses of foreignness and incoherence. Though isolated by the darkness symbolizing debilitating patriarchy, the double are drawn inescapably to each other, and their repetitious grappling with each other can be read as their engagement with the traumatic past. L observes that “war is good for the lonely” (2004: 161, original italics). In this view, fighting functions as their main communicative approach. Similarly, Nicolas Berdyaev suggests that “dis-pute, conflict, and even hatred are all social manifestations which often serve to suppress or to allay the sense of solitude” (1947: 71). Accordingly, the fighting reflects the women’s claim for each other as the objet a; as the narrator of this novel claims, “the fights did nothing other than allow them to hold each other.

[. . .] Like friendship, hatred needed more than physical intimacy; it wanted crea-tivity and hard work to sustain itself” (2004: 82–83). Fighting proves an inescap-able way to validation and valorization for the pair buried alive by the aftermath

of chattel enslavement. By wrestling with each other, they attempt to break up the containment of loneliness engendered by the outrages of slavery, thus transcend-ing their sense of liminality and thrusttranscend-ing their way into the centre of the self.

Christine runs away from home while still a teenager, registering as the first for-eigner-fugitive from the big house in the novel. Displaced by her double Heed, she flees the Resort, spending years away on the road. Her plunging into the out-side adult world is readable as her effort to escape the self-annihilating solitude caused by the betrayal of her family as well as her double Nel. Yet, drifting from one place to another, she laments in her senile years that

she hadn’t escaped from anything. Maple Valley, Cosey’s hotel, Manila’s whorehouse – all three floated in sexual tension and resentment; all three insisted on confinement; in all three status was money. And all were orga-nized around the pressing needs of men. (2004: 107, italics mine).

Arguably, all three inevitably and irrevocably add to her feeling of foreignness.

Her predisposition to sexual exploitation speaks to her inability to set up safe and appropriate boundaries between herself and others. In Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis, Stephen A. Mitchell suggests that

the repetitive patterns within human experience are not derived, as in the drive model, from pursuing gratification of inherent pressures and pleasures (nor, as in Freud’s post-1920 understanding, from the automatic workings of the death instinct), but from a pervasive tendency to preserve the continu-ity, connections, familiarity of one’s personal, interactional world. (1988:

33)

The tendency of human beings to preserve a sense of connection and continuity impels them to repeat previous patterns of life. It is thus natural that every man Christine chooses thereafter bears a striking resemblance to Cosey: exploitative, possessive and wealthy. Tragically, by taking refuge in the outside world, she escapes nothing, since “every serious affair she’d had led straight to jail” (Morri-son 2004: 105). Without exception, her lives both inside and outside the mansion are tarnished by female longing and male (the Other’s) desire, which accounts for her tendency to enter into dangerous situations repeatedly. As the narrator ob-serves, “her slide from spoiled child to tarnished homelessness had never been slow nor hidden” (2004: 101). Stumbling on unconditional love and impoverished by a life of abandonment, she experiences deeply the traumas of her grandfather’s emotional abandonment, her father’s death, her bosom friend’s betrayal, and May’s sterile materiality. It is arguable that Christine’s “addiction” to exploitative sexual relationships corresponds to her efforts at compensatory restoration – her

desperate need to restore a merger fantasy with Cosey, who serves as the ideal-ized parent imago for every one of his kinswomen.

Beloved haunts Love in the figure of Junior, a wayward teenage girl from the Set-tlement,⁶¹ who spies on the warring women inhabiting the house on One Monarch Street. Emphasizing the harm done to black females, L observes, “Naturally all of them have a sad story: too much notice, not enough, or the worst kind” (2004: 5, original italics). Evidently she is commenting on dysfunctional black motherhood.

In this context, scarred by a detached mother and a distant father, Junior’s forma-tive years are deprived of contents and colours. Additionally, the frequent assaults from her abusive teenage uncles foster hatred and hostility in her, catapulting her into the outside world. She registers as another foreigner estranged from her peo-ple: when she was eleven she ran away and “wandered for weeks without atten-tion being paid” (2004: 65). Though having successfully extracted herself from the nightmarish life of the Settlement, she is worryingly crippled, both physically and psychologically. Her legs and hair convey the distress and desire plaguing the girl: “Dancer’s legs: long, unhappy at rest, eager to lift, to spread, to wrap them-selves around you” (2004: 41); and her hair: “soft, loud, mixing threat and invita-tion” (2004: 209).

As a wandering soul with “no past, no history but her own” (2004: 197), Junior recalls the “motherless child” Sula, and the rootless, family-craving Paul D. The years of homeless strife and struggle empower her to start a life from scratch among the feud-inflamed women: fully aware of her peripheral position in society as well as the grand mansion, she ingratiates herself with both of them immediate-ly after her arrival at the anarchic household: “If she pleased both women, they

As a wandering soul with “no past, no history but her own” (2004: 197), Junior recalls the “motherless child” Sula, and the rootless, family-craving Paul D. The years of homeless strife and struggle empower her to start a life from scratch among the feud-inflamed women: fully aware of her peripheral position in society as well as the grand mansion, she ingratiates herself with both of them immediate-ly after her arrival at the anarchic household: “If she pleased both women, they