Democracy Matters Page 9
For Melville, this black inferno was not only the vantage point of viewing the American democratic experiment but also the litmus test for assessing the deep democratic tradition in America. The enslavement of Africans and Manifest Destiny over Amerindians proved the noble lie of American democracy. And he felt this on the most intimate of levels. His father-in-law, Lemuel Shaw, was the chief justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts who handed down the most famous test of the Fugitive Slave Law. Shaw ordered the black ex-slave Thomas Sims back to his southern owner. Later, in another infamous case, Shaw decreed that the fugitive ex-slave Anthony Burns return to his owner. Melville’s abolitionist sentiments cut against the grain of many in his personal family and national community, but he expressed them nonetheless. Today his loving yet harsh indictment of America rings louder and truer than ever. And he has always resonated with the most acute truth tellers of America. The commitment to self-worth and individual potential of the Emersonian combines with the commitment to deep-searching truth telling of the Melvillean in the most American of art forms, the blues and jazz.
Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith, Duke Ellington and Ma Rainey, John Coltrane and Sarah Vaughan—all foundational figures of the blues and jazz heritage—created and enacted a profound democratic paideia—a cultivation of critical citizenry—in the midst of the darkness of America. If the blues is the struggle against pain for transcendence, then, as Duke Ellington proclaimed, “jazz is freedom.” Like Emerson, these great blues and jazz musicians are eloquent connoisseurs of individuality in their improvisational arts and experimental lives. Unlike Emerson, they sit on the edge of America’s abyss—in the invisible chocolate infernos of the American paradise. Like Melville, they engage in deep-sea diving beneath the apparent American sunshine. Unlike Melville, they emerge with a strong blood-soaked hope and a seductive tear stained smile. They are the consummate American practitioners of the tragicomic.
This world-historical black confrontation with the absurd in America and the absurd as America—with the frightening American threat to black sanity and dignity in slavery, Jim Crow, and discrimination—produced a distinctive deepening of the democratic tradition in America. This deepening is not simply a matter of the expansion of rights and liberties for all Americans as seen in the social movements led by Frederick Douglass, A. Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King Jr., and Ella Baker. It also has to do with the very meaning of democracy in America—the recasting of the contours of democratic vision and the re-creating of the contents of democratic modes of existence. The blues and jazz made it possible to engage race in America on personal and intimate terms—with democratic results. The great white literary bluesman Tennessee Williams prophetically entitled his first collection of plays American Blues. The rich blues and jazz heritage was eventually embraced by white citizens and was especially appealing to the antiestablishment youth behind the infectious pulses of rock. This heritage was the first major cultural point of contact between whites and blacks, and we’ve seen this dynamic again in the embrace of rhythm and blues and hip-hop by white citizens.
As infectious and embracing as the blues is, we should never forget that the blues was born out of the crucible of slavery and its vicious legacy, that it expresses the determination of a people to assert their human value. The blues professes to the deep psychic and material pains inflicted on black people within the sphere of a mythological American land of opportunity. The central role of the human voice in this heritage reflects the commitment to the value of the individual and of speaking up about ugly truths; it asserts the necessity of robust dialogue—of people needing to listen up—in the face of entrenched dogma. The patient resilience expressed in the blues flows from the sustained resistance to ugly forms of racist domination, and from the forging of inextinguishable hope in the contexts of American social death and soul murder. The blues produced a mature spiritual and communal strength. The stress the blues placed on dialogue, resistance, and hope is the very lifeblood for a vital democratic citizenry.
The most sophisticated exploration of this black enactment of dialogue, resistance, and hope is found in the magisterial corpus of Toni Morrison. The blues and jazz heritage speaks most profoundly and profusely in her literary works. She is the towering democratic artist and intellectual of our time. Morrison’s texts embody and enact forms of deep democratic energies unparalleled in America’s long struggle with the dark side of its democracy.
She highlights the strong will and potential promise of democratic individuals. Ordinary people taking back their power sit at the center of her artistic vision. Regarding one of her masterpieces, Beloved (1987), she states:
The slaveholders have won if this experience is beyond my imagination and my powers. It’s like humor: you have to take the authority back; you realign where the power is. So I wanted to take the power. They were very inventive and imaginative with cruelty, so I have to take it back—in a way that I can tell it.
This profoundly democratic action, of taking back power over one’s life—enacted both by Morrison as artist and her characters in her art—is indebted to Emersonian nonconformity and resistance to prevailing authority. But like Melville, Morrison is also keenly alert to the formidable impediments to democratic individuality and community. One of her most vivid characters, Sethe in Beloved, explains why she killed her daughter, named Beloved, when a fugitive-slave hunter came to take them all back to their southern slave owners. Sethe says:
That anybody white could take your whole self for anything that came to mind. Not just work, kill, or maim you, but dirty you. Dirty you so bad you couldn’t like yourself anymore. Dirty you so bad you forgot who you were and couldn’t think it up. And though she and others lived through and got over it, she could never let it happen to her own. The best thing she was, was her children. Whites might dirty her all right, but not her best thing, her beautiful, magical best thing—the part of her that was clean. No undreamable dreams about whether the headless, feetless torso hanging in the tree with a sign on it was her husband or Paul A; whether the bubbling-hot girls in the colored-school fire set by patriots included her daughter; whether a gang of whites invaded her daughter’s private parts, soiled her daughter’s thighs and threw her daughter out of the wagon. She might have to work the slaughterhouse yard, but not her daughter.
And no one, nobody on this earth, would list her daughter’s characteristics on the animal side of the paper. No. Oh no.
Morrison’s exploration of the heart of American darkness is most essentially a search for the possibility of democratic community—a vision of everyday people renouncing narrow self-interest and creating a web of caring under harsh American circumstances. Morrison notes:
Those people could not live without value. They had prices, but no value in the white world, so they made their own, and they decided what was valuable. It was usually eleemosynary [charitable], usually something they were doing for somebody else. Nobody in the novel, no adult black person, survives by self-regard, narcissism, selfishness. They took the sense of community for granted. It never occurred to them they could live outside of it.
Morrison’s debt to Melville is quite conscious and deliberate. He was the first American literary artist to explore whiteness as an ideology and its traumatic effects on blacks and whites. As she writes in her pioneering literary critical text Playing in the Dark (1992):
And if the white whale is the ideology of race, what Ahab has lost to it is personal dismemberment and family and society and his own place as a human in the world. The trauma of racism is, for the racist and the victim, the severe fragmentation of the self and has always seemed to me a cause (not a symptom) of psychosis.
In Morrison’s vision, it is fear and insecurity that drive the dogmatisms and nihilisms of imperial elites like Ahab, and love and hope that bind democratic communities in response to the offenses of imperial power and might. Melville’s artistic integrity and democratic courage left him “very alone, very desperate and ve
ry doomed” in mid-nineteenth-century America. As Morrison comments about Melville’s effort:
To question the very notion of white progress, the very idea of racial superiority, of whiteness as privileged place in the evolutionary ladder of humankind, and to meditate on the fraudulent, self-destroying philosophy of that superiority, to “pluck it out from under the robes of Senators and Judges,” to drag the “judge himself to the bar”—that was dangerous, solitary, radical work. Especially then. Especially now.
But rather than encouraging either revenge or despair, Morrison, like Baldwin, puts forth a vision of black democratic identity rooted in a love that embraces all—a love and trust that holds together a democratic community and society. When asked what is her favorite metaphor for her work, she replied:
Love. We have to embrace ourselves…. James Baldwin once said, “You’ve already been bought and paid for. Your ancestors already gave it up for you. You don’t have to do that anymore. Now you can love yourself.”…
That’s why we’re here. We have to do something nurturing that we respect, before we go. We must. It is more interesting, more complicated, more intellectually demanding and more morally demanding to love somebody. To take care of somebody….
What is interesting to me is that under the circumstances in which the people in my books live there is this press toward love.
Morrison’s powerful portraits of community—also enhanced by her Catholicism—speak to the need for citizens in a democracy to be socially engaged, to involve ourselves with one another’s lives. Her message of democratic love resists the narrow arrogance and self-interest of the nihilism taking hold of our society. The most free and democratic character in Morrison’s eight powerful novels—Pilate in Song of Solomon (1978)—says on her deathbed, “I wish I’d a knowed more people. I would have loved ’em all. If I’d a knowed more, I would a loved more.” In a commentary on Pilate, Morrison clearly displays her Baldwinian ethic of love and her democratic faith:
That’s a totally generous free woman. She’s fearless. She’s not afraid of anything. She has very few material things. She has a little self-supporting skill that she performs. She doesn’t run anybody’s life. She’s available for almost infinite love. If you need her—she’ll deliver. And she has complete clarity about who she is.
For Morrison, this belief in the capacity of everyday people to forge personal dignity and in the power of democratic community to resist the abuse of elite power is the core of America’s deep democratic tradition. Like Baldwin, she sees this belief most readily manifest in the black musical tradition. The dangerous freedom embedded in the performance of musical artists is a form of taking back one’s powers in the face of one’s apparent powerlessness. Morrison notes:
My notion of love…is very closely related to blues. There’s always somebody leaving somebody, and there’s never any vengeance, any bitterness…. It’s quite contrary to the overwhelming notion of love that’s the business of the majority culture.
She is our premier literary musician, and her texts are communal experiences in which the audience participates in and with her performance.
Morrison’s aim is to spark in the reader a desire to explore the rich human depths of a dehumanized people, to revel in the forms of linguistic delicacies alongside their social miseries, and to be unsettled by the hypocrisy of an American chamber of horrors as the empire trumpets liberty and opportunity for all. That is why she places so much stress on the cadences of the human voice in her works. As in the blues, this emphasis asserts the dignity and individuality of her characters; it allows us to see inside them and demands that we listen to them. To hear the nuances of voice is to gain some access to the humanity of individuals. To listen closely to the tones of voice is to be open to the interiority of persons. Her democratic mission is to heal—yet to shatter moral numbness and awaken sleepwalking hurts. As she writes: “Anything dead coming back to life hurts.” As Ellison wrote, the purpose is to “keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness” in order to be able to transcend that pain. She enacts on the page what black blues singers perform on the stage—with similar strategies of repetitive refrains, rhythmic language, syncopated sounds, and dark laughter. She writes about her intent:
My efforts to make aural literature—A-U-R-A-L—work because I do hear it…it has to sound and if it doesn’t sound right…
So I do a lot of revision when I write in order to clean away the parts of the book that can only work as print. It has to have certain kinds of fundamental characteristics (one of) which is the participation of the other, that is, the audience, the reader, and that you can do with a spoken story.
Morrison’s subtle grounding in black musical forms poses a serious challenge to her readers. Her books require readers to take part in them. Even a critic as sophisticated and astute as Harold Bloom—usually supremely confident in his literary critiques—openly ponders: “I do not believe that Morrison writes fiction of a kind I am not yet competent to read and judge….”
Morrison’s books can also be almost too painful to bear. She transfigures the blues cry in the dark depths with “circles and circles of sorrow.” But, as with blues artists, she tells us: “If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.” And despite their difficulty, her books have become bestsellers, read avidly by blacks, whites, and others, which is a great testament to the democratic potential residing within the American public.
Morrison’s fundamental democratic insight is that there can be democratic dialogue only when one is open to the humanity of individuals and to the interiority of their personalities. Like the blues, Morrison assumes the full-fledged humanity of black people—a revolutionary gesture in a racist civilization—and thereby dethrones the superior status of whites. This assumption liberates both blacks and whites and enables them to embark on a candid, though painful, engagement with life and death, joy and sorrow, resistance and domination, hope and despair in the American empire. Like her beloved Faulkner, Morrison takes us into the underworld and underground of the American Disney World to lay bare the lives of those ambushed by disillusionment and hampered by disappointment.
Morrison is a democratic subversive because she shuns all forms of authority that suppress the flowering of unique individuality. She heralds all kinds of free self-creations that take seriously quests for wisdom and justice. Her insistence on the need to appreciate the plights and values of all people is a vital guide as we attempt to instill democracy in the Middle East, a region riven by issues of offended identity.
Our democracy is certainly in horrible disrepair, and the disengagement of so many, along with the flight into superficial forms of entertainment and life satisfaction, is understandable. But the deep love of and commitment to democracy expressed by these great artists and the long tradition of scrutinizing the ravages of our imperialism are strong.
The anger and disillusionment that so many Americans have felt toward the Bush administration, especially in regard to the dishonest manipulation in launching the Iraq war, is not a narrowly partisan affair. It is not a matter of the typical polarization of party politics. The passion evoked by the administration comes out of deep commitment to democratic ideals. If the administration had not been betraying those ideals, it would not have had to lie to the public in order to generate support for the war. The impassioned critique on the part of so many Americans of the current American militarism is a testament to just how alive and intense the public commitment to democracy is.
Though the saturation of American market-driven culture around the world has obscured the deep democratic strain in American life, it is in fact in America where democratic intellectuals have had the deepest tradition and greatest impact. The most profound democratic artist and intellectual—Anton Chekhov—did not live in a democratic experiment. We can be inspired by his democratic genius—as seen in his massive popularity in our time—but our American context does not require that we try
to get a democratic experiment off the ground (as he did); rather, we must sustain and refine ours before it falls to the ground.
Since American civilization is first and foremost a business culture—a market-driven society—its elected officials and corporate elites are preoccupied with economic growth and national prosperity. That is why it has been primarily artistic, activist, and intellectual voices from outside the political and economic establishments who have offered the most penetrating insights and energizing visions and have pushed the development of the American democratic project.
That deep tradition of democratic artists, activists, and intellectuals is very much alive and well. We have great playwrights like Tony Kushner, August Wilson, and Arthur Miller who never lose sight of democratic individuality as they probe the underside of American life; grand novelists such as Thomas Pynchon, Russell Banks, and of course Toni Morrison who disclose the workings of struggling democratic communities in the face of elite power; major filmmakers like Charles Burnett and the Wachowski brothers who give us a glimpse of crisis-ridden democratic societies in the wake of our information age; and towering social critics like Noam Chomsky and Susan Sontag who wed the humanist tradition to democratic ideals. When Marian Wright Edelman fights to eliminate child poverty, William Greider calls for pension funds to be used to support socially responsible enterprises, Angela Davis questions the role of prisons, Barbara Ehrenreich highlights the plight of the working poor, Dolores Huerta promotes unionization of immigrant workers, or Ralph Nader fights for democratic accountability of corporations, we know the imperialist strain in American life can be resisted. Most important, when visionary and courageous citizens see through the dogmas and nihilisms of those who rule us and join together to pursue democratic individuality, progress can be made in our communities and our society. The deep democratic tradition in America that these and so many other of our most challenging and prophetic artists have called forth and kept alive is the greatest gift of America to the world.