HOME I TONI MORRISON I

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 10^th 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.