King, Natalie

As reflected in Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow and Toni Morrison's Tar Baby, many black characters in literature with a Caribbean setting inhabit a realm of stasis. They negotiate two worlds---a white world with hierarchies of power and success and selective acceptance, and a black world, usually with restricted power. Caught between these two worlds, the exiled slowly begin to lose their sense of roots and to embrace cultural suicide. Some flee to the Caribbean, where they may regain what is lost. This paradise, with all its historical markers of the African diaspora, ultimately forces these characters either to confront their rootlessness and to reconnect with the community or to destroy any connections they once had. In dramatizing the journeys and choices of their protagonists, Marshall and Morrison reinvent the Caribbean not just as a retreat, but as a site for reclamation of black identity.

The question of hybridity is a complex social issue that commonly addresses agendas of heart, politics, and mind. It is a question that is both deeply personal and overtly political and addresses the entire spectrum of American society. Hybridity, in my view, can be used to interrogate a society rooted in ideas of race definition. Nella Larsen's Quicksand, Jean Toomer's Cane, and James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man depict the struggles of the mixed-race characters as they seek an identity of wholeness through attempting to live up to a social prescription of sameness. These characters wander in search of a raceless society; they cross boundaries of language and live in silence in a dichotomized world of public conformity and private duality despite their efforts to unite the two.

Many Caribbean writers have felt the burden of conformity to European standards of literary expression. The region is without the extended historical tradition of the "Old World," because the privilege to know the roots of its past has been undercut by slavery and colonialism. West Indian literature has been undervalued at best, ignored at worst. Much early literature set in the Caribbean was created by outsiders who omitted the linguistic, cultural, and historical traditions of the populace. Many modern Caribbean writers now recognize that through literature, the tale of the people can be revitalized. The call for a unique regional voice has been embedded in the work of such writers as Louise Bennett and Derek Walcott, who have used the language and setting of the Caribbean to move away from Europeanized literary ideals to the advertisement of the everyday. Such writers give voice to unique Caribbean forms of expression.

Toni Morrison's black characters in her novel Beloved dwell in a middle realm between slavery and a life full of responsibility. This middle realm or "safe" haven enables them to "disremember" past injustices. However, it also renders them disabled when trying to resolve moral issues, and allows them to exist blindly within the confines of an isolated illusion of almost pubescent security. In this state, characters have the certainty of the horrors of slavery behind them, but they have the uncertainty of the future ahead. Morrison's characters require the motivation of an apocalyptic upheaval (revelation or unveiling) as a catalyst to move them from that area of stasis and emotional impasse to the next level of their development and finally toward a sense of community. This movement from the middle realm to the apocalypse is conveyed by Morrison through myths drawn from several cultures. Her ability to manipulate and meld these myths provides the link to humanity's quest for control in an illusory world, and growth initiated by apocalyptic awakenings.