Translating a History of “Unspeakable” Otherness into a Discourse of Empowered “Choices”

Abstract

In the most radical act performed in Toni Morrison’s fiction, the fugitive slave Sethe “collected every bit of life she had made, all the parts of her that were precious and fine and beautiful, and carried, dragged them through the veil, out away over there where no one could hurt them” (Beloved 163). Her infanticide takes one unnamed daughter outside the reach of slavery and almost succeeds in carrying the other three children as well. Reconstructing her scandalous mercy killing, Morrison’s own novel “rips that veil drawn over ‘proceedings too terrible to relate’” in traditional slave narratives (Morrison, “The Site of Memory” 113). Morrison’s double act of “unveiling” has been read in connection to W. E. B. Du Bois’s penetrating diagnosis of the American Negro’s psychocultural condition (see the first epigraph). Born with the “Veil of Color” instituted by a segregationist ideology that “ended a civil war by beginning a race feud” (Du Bois 29), the American Negro is caught between the desire to achieve “true self-consciousness” and the necessity to “see himself through the revelation of the other world.” In order to regain visibility Negroes must rip the “veil,” striving for self-definition.

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

—W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (3)

Now that Afro American artistic presence has been “discovered” actually to exist, now that serious scholarship has moved from silencing the witnesses and erasing their meaningful place in and contribution to American culture, it is no longer acceptable to imagine us and imagine for us. We have always been imagining ourselves. […] We are the subjects of our own narrative, witnesses to and participants in our own experience and, in no way coincidentally, in the experience of those with whom we have come into contact. We are not, in fact, “other.” We are choices.

—Toni Morrison, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken” (208)