The Source of Self-Regard - Toni Morrison Page 0,52
ear. Or lay my mind down by sorrow’s side.
This is no predictable apocalyptic reflex, surfacing out of the century’s mist like a Loch Ness hallucination. This is a mourning, a requiem, a folding away of time’s own future.
What becomes most compelling, therefore, are the places and voices where the journey into the cellar of time is a rescue of sorts, an excavation for the purposes of building, discovering, envisioning a future. I am not, of course, encouraging and anointing happy endings—forced or truly felt—or anointing bleak ones intended as correctives or warnings. I mean to call attention to whether the hand that holds the book’s metaphors is an open palm or a fist.
In The Salt Eaters, Toni Cade Bambara opens this brilliant novel with a startling question: “Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?” Are you sure you want to be well? What flows from that very serious inquiry is a healing that requires a frightened modern-day Demeter to fathom and sound every minute of her and her community’s depths, to rethink and relive the past—simply to answer that question. The success of her excavation is described in these terms:
“What had driven Velma into the oven…was nothing compared to what awaited her, was to come….Of course she would fight it, Velma was a fighter. Of course she would reject what could not be explained in terms of words, notes, numbers or those other systems whose roots had been driven far underground….Velma’s next trial might lead to an act far more devastating than striking out at the body or swallowing gas….
“The patient turning smoothly on the stool, head thrown back about to shout, to laugh, to sing. No need of Minnie’s hands now. That is clear. Velma’s glow aglow and two yards wide of clear and unstreaked white and yellow. Her eyes scanning the air surrounding Minnie, then examining her own hands, fingers stretched and radiant. No need of Minnie’s hands now so the healer withdraws them, drops them in her lap just as Velma, rising on steady legs, throws off the shawl that drops down on the stool a burst cocoon.”
The title of Salman Rushdie’s latest novel, The Moor’s Last Sigh, suggests the narrative will end on a deathbed or in a graveyard. In fact it does. The storyteller/protagonist, Moraes Zogoiby, leads us on an exhilarating journey in order to nail his papers on the wall. Papers that are the result of his “daily, silent singing for [his daily] life.” Telling, writing, recording four generations of family and national history. A history of devastating loves, transcendent hatreds; of ambition without limit and sloth without redemption; loyalties beyond understanding and deceptions beyond imagination. When every step, every pause of this imaginary is finally surrendered to our view, this is the close:
The rough grass in the graveyard has grown high and spiky and as I sit upon this tombstone I seem to be resting upon the grass’s yellow points, weightless, floating free of burdens, borne aloft by a thick brush of miraculously unbending blades. I do not have long. My breaths are numbered, like the years of the ancient world, in reverse, and the countdown to zero is well advanced. I have used the last of my strength to make this pilgrimage….
At the head of this tombstone are three eroded letters; my fingertip reads them for me. R I P. Very well: I will rest, and hope for peace. The world is full of sleepers waiting for their moment of return….Somewhere, in a tangle of thorns, a beauty in a glass coffin awaits a prince’s kiss. See: here is my flask. I’ll drink some wine; and then, like a latter-day Van Winkle, I’ll lay me down upon this graven stone, lay my head beneath these letters R I P, and close my eyes, according to our family’s old practice of falling asleep in times of trouble, and hope to awaken, renewed and joyful, into a better time.
The rest, the peace is twice enunciated, but so is the hope. For renewal, joy, and, most importantly, “a better time.”
In 1991 Ben Okri ended his novel The Famished Road with a dream so deeply felt it is prioritized over the entire narrative:
The air in the room was calm. There were no turbulences. His [father’s] presence protected our nightspace. There were no forms invading our air, pressing down on our roof, walking through the objects. The air was clear and wide. In my sleep I found open spaces where I floated