On Sunday
afternoon, June 25, 1950, broadcasters in the US interrupted regular radio
programmes to report the first fragmentary dispatches disclosing that the
Communists had invaded South Korea.
President Truman, enjoying a quiet weekend in Independence, Missouri,
rushed back to Washington and committed American troops to combat in Korea. Over
36,000 US troops were killed in the Korean War. This number was however much
less compared to the 58,000 who were killed in Vietnam over the next two
decades. The Fifties is indentified today as the decade of Marlyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, launch of Sputnik, and the
civil rights movement. It is associated more with the exhilaration of a new era
than the return of war-scarred soldiers. Toni Morrison goes back to her
memories of the decade in her latest novel Home and her impression of it
is neither nostalgic nor euphoric.
The protagonist,
Frank ‘Smart’ Money is a black man who has returned shell shocked from the
Korean battlefield. It is his journey home to Lotus, in Georgia, and a
subsequent discovery of it that forms the slim yet very visual story. Home engages readers at several levels
and in varying degrees of complexity through a richly variegated narrative. Frank
wakes up tied in a “nuthouse” and makes a quick escape. His journey, marred by
his frail mental condition, is aided largely by the kindness of strangers. It
is the memory of his sister Ycidra (Cee) that keeps him going despite painful black-and-white
flashes and “visitations” from a zoot-suited man. He must reach Cee soon or as the note
threatened him “She be dead if you tarry.”
Morrison’s
works are characterized by her attempts to tap the inner dissonance and demons.
When Morrison was very young her parents fell behind with the rent and the
landlord set fire to the house in which they lived. Writing her 10th
novel at 81, Morrison continues to draws heavily on her experiences of loss,
uprooting and love.
Morrison,
wrote her first novel, the Bluest Eye at the age of 39. This was the
story of an 11-year-old black girl wishing for her eyes to be blue that
highlighted sense of self-loathing induced by the prevailing concepts of
beauty. With the Bluest Eye Morrison touched a new aspect of black writing. She
wrote as an insider, not one standing with the white audience but essentially sticking
to her experience. Over the years she disagreed with Ralph Ellison’s positioning
of the race in Invisible Man,
“Invisible to who? Not to me,” she maintained.
Her 1973
novel Sula and 1987 novel Beloved,
received much critical acclaim. While The
Bluest Eye drew upon the memory of
days when black was not beautiful, Sula
and Beloved focused on the
experiences of black women. In Beloved
a mother prefers to kill her daughter than see her become a slave and in Sula
the story traces the bond of friendship between two women. In 1993 Morrison was
awarded the literature Nobel for “novels characterized by visionary force and
poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality.” She was the first black woman to receive the
award.
Home is Morrison’s 10th novel and her first
book after the death of her 45-year-old son Slade, from pancreatic cancer.
Morrison’s
novels work at multiple levels simultaneously. At one step you will find her
characters living out a complex black existence. At another you find them
struggling with their roles as women or men. Take a step ahead and you find them
denizens of the American nation and at another they are but humans complete
with common emotions and an uncommon sense of honour.
While it’s
hard to focus on any one of these aspects, it’s nearly impossible to read her
novels without the sense of history with which she writes. So if you are not on
your guard you might miss the fact that Frank has to find his way at the back
of the bus partitioned away from the “white folks”; a sign at the public
lavatory dissuades him from using it and he is forced to relieve himself behind
the bushes; a stranger helps him with a list of right type of lodging from
where he won’t be turned away. A kind pastor warns him: “Listen here, you from
Georgia and you been in a desegregated army and maybe you think up North is way
different from down South. Don’t believe it and don’t count on it. Custom is
just as real as law and can be just as dangerous.”
While Frank
makes his way to Cee, we journey backward and relive the troubled times with
the family that is driven out by the landlord. Cee is born in a church basement
and as Frank takes charge of her the first word she learns to speak turns out
to be “Fawnk”. Over the years it is the elder brother who protects her from a
vicious step-grandmother and deceitful boys. But as Frank and his friends
enlist for war Cee is left on her own. She runs off and marries a “rat” named
Prince who leaves her soon after. She gets a job at Dr Scott’s clinic and as we
find her looking at books on eugenics in the doctor’s library we know that
she’s going to get into trouble.
Frank finds
and carries Cee, who is bleeding to death, back to Lotus. While the story is
about finding a home on one hand it is also about redemption on the other. While
Cee has to move out of her scared, scarred past, Frank has to make peace with
the terrible war memories. Both incur irreparable losses and yet they struggle
to make peace with their lives. There
are two voices in the story, one of a narrator and the other of Frank who time
and again corrects and converses with the narrator. It is almost as if the
character was speaking to Morrison and taking it upon himself to add to or
correct her rendition of his story.
