The Source of Self-Regard - Toni Morrison Page 0,152

encourage readings that dissect both. Which is to say I claimed the right and the range of authorship. To interrupt journalistic history with a metaphorical one; to impose on a rhetorical history an imagistic one; to read the world, misread it; write and unwrite it. To enact silence and free speech. In short to do what all writers aspire to do. I wanted my work to be the work of disabling the art versus politics argument; to perform the union of aesthetics and ethics.

I am impressed by the fruitfulness and importance of scholarly and literary challenges that search for more ways in which to both sign and defang race, acknowledge its import and limit its corrosive effect on language. That is, work that avoids the unnatural schism between the political realm in which race matters and the artistic one in which it is presumed not to.

Scholarship that abandons the enforcing properties of the false debate and welcomes the challenges in the liberating ones hidden at its center is becoming sensitive to the fact that things have changed. Language that requires the mutual exclusion of x and y, or the dominance of x over y, is slowly losing its magic, its force. But it is literature that rehearses and enacts this change in ways far in advance of and more probingly than the critical language that follows it. Perhaps it is because of my own farewell to all that art versus politics, culture against aesthetics quarrel that I find literary partings (moments of racial goodbyes) so promising a site in which to examine the sea change expressive language of racial encounter has undergone, a sea change yielding opportunities for richer and more nuanced explorations. Over time the rites of farewell between the races as represented in some selected examples in American literature have moved dramatically from blatant assumptions of racial hierarchy to less overt ones to coded representation to nuanced decodings of those assumptions; from control to dismissal to anxiety to a kind of informed ease. Now, I insist on not being misunderstood here—implying that neutralizing race is the work of literature, its job, so to speak. It is not. Nevertheless the shape of racial discourse can be located there. A shape that plays about and moves through literature and therefore in our imaginations when we read it. Although even this brief inquiry could and ought to be widened, I will limit my observations to women writers because intimacy and alienation and severance between women is more often free of the sexual competition implicit among male writers addressing the same subject, and anxieties about sexual dominance can blur as well as exacerbate the racial equation (as Shakespeare and Hollywood both knew). Saying goodbye is a moment ready-made for literary histrionics, for deep emotional revelations seething with meaning. I am interested in the farewell between black and white strangers who have, or might have, shared something significant; or who represent the end of something larger than themselves, where the separation symbolizes loss or renewal, for example. There are the partings between black and white women whose histories are permanently entangled. Many, if not most, of these are surrogate relationships: surrogate mothers in the nanny-child domain; surrogate mothers, aunts, and other relatives in the servant-mistress category; surrogate sisters in which the friendships become surrogate, illegal, precisely because the dynamics of power between employer and employee are inescapably raced; and sometimes, though rarely, there is the farewell between black and white adult women in which the equity is not race based. Alice Walker’s Meridian is an early example.

Let me begin with a farewell scene in a fine and prolific writer who is not American, but who was herself a foreigner far from home and who was in a position to form opinions on racial relationships from close quarters, Isak Dinesen. There is a haunting scene in Out of Africa that exhibits standard racial discourse as well as the presumptions of the foreigner’s home. The scene in which the author is leaving a place, Kenya, that has been her home for much of her adult life. The necessity of moving out of Africa and its melancholy surface in each moment of leave-taking.

A passage toward the end reads as follows:

Now the old women were sorry that I was leaving them. From this last time, I keep the picture of a Kikuyu woman, nameless to me, for I did not know her well, she belonged, I think, to Kathegu’s village, and was the wife or