[Tyr Zalo Hawk]: 712.Essays.Response Papers.A Point of Contention

It was with great hesitancy that I read the essay by Toni Morrison entitled “Black Matter(s).” This hesitancy was not due to some ill-conceived uneasiness that some Caucasian males can and do feel towards the history between our ethnicity and that of the Africans. This hesitancy also did not originate from the daunting task of reading a living author who has been certified as “the most widely respected and read African American novelist of our time” (Pg 309). No, this hesitancy came up from the depths of uneasiness I always feel sloshing in my gut that is simply waiting for an idealist/nationalist/racist to slip up, just once, so I can tear their argument apart. This is why I read “Black Matter(s)” slowly, carefully, and deliberately, until I found what I was looking for, even though I really wish I hadn’t.
Morrison has a way with words that cannot be denied. She is an articulate thinker and a master rhetorician who, in effect, proves every point she sets her mind on proving. This is what has made her the infamous writer she is. For example, when she defines the term ‘American,’ she does not simply let the statement “American means white” (Morrison 318) stand on its own. Instead, she is vehement about juxtaposing the definition of American with that of other, comparable nations: “This is not true of Candian or English. To indentify someone as South African is to say very little; we need the adjective “white” or “black” or “colored” to make our meaning clear” (318). This is the sort of logical that Morrison utilizes so very effectively to argue that the African (or Black) influence has always been overshadowed and undervalued in the context of the American history and literature which it has had a profound effect upon. This notion, this concept that such a defining characteristic of our history can be dismissed was so baffling to Morrison that she wonders “whether the major, much celebrated themes of American literature … are not in fact responses to a dark, abiding, signing Africanistic presence” (310). If it is so important, after all, how can anyone deny it? How can the greatest minds simply throw away such an important notion?
Morrison herself answers the question of what happens one leaves out the Black influence when she explains her own first experiences with the literature in question, and dismisses the idea of black influence as easily as her predecessors: “As a reader, I had always assumed that nothing ‘happens.’ That Africans and their descendants are there in no sense that matters” (312). However, despite this initial slip, she comes back around to explain that this error was as temporary as it was foolish. She relates her experience to that of herself looking into a fishbowl, entranced by the wonders inside only to realize that such wonders are only possible within the transparent, forgotten bowl (312). This is the sort of argument that Morrison presents and this is the work which I read so carefully looking for an error in judgment or an misstep that I could take and make my defining moment of defiance against the great mind that Morrison is. I found this one, trifling detail amidst her arguments, and it is this one thing which I cannot ignore no matter how I may try.
Growing up as a white male on an Indian reservation, my life has been fishbowled. This influence, more powerful in my life than I would like to give it credit for, is exactly the one which Morrison dismisses so casually in her eloquent argument “Why [was America] ‘raw and savage’? Because it is peopled by a nonwhite indigenous population? Perhaps. But certainly because there is readily at hand a bound and unfree… black population” (317). Perhaps? While I am aware that Morrison should be, and more than likely is, well versed in American history, how is it that she can deny the shaping influence of the Native American population? These were a people who raided and slaughtered settlements; a people which the white men traded with, and enslaved until a hardier, ‘dirtier’ people were discovered as replacements. The Native Americans, those tribes which generations of immigrants fought, killed, and gave diseases to, whose rituals and traditions seemed not only archaic, but barbaric to the immigrating Europeans are only a possibility for the wildness and savageness of the developing America? I don’t think so. These tribes, along with the very nature of the gigantic tracts of ‘unexplored land’ filled with ‘strange beasts’ are unquestionably as much, if not more of, a reason for rawness and savageness than any enslaved race. Morrison may have me convinced of everything else, of the power and the molding influence of Africanism on Americanism, but she will never sell to me the idea that her people are the reason for everything in literature and the conceptions that people had of this New World. That is one point I found, and the one thing I cannot let go of, no matter how her words try to lull me away from it.