• ISSUE NUMBffi THRE & FOUR • 1988 • Haven Imagined & Paradise Lost Aderemi Raji-Oyelade Toni Morrison. PARADISE, Alfred A Knopf. New Yorfe, 1998, 318pp. They don't need men and they don't need God... everybody who goes near them is maimed somehow and the mess is seeping back into our homes, our families. We can't have it, you all. Can't have it at all. (276) T HE statement here produced as epi- graph is a declarative utterance which signifies the primary project of conflict of identities and power re- lations metaphorically and masterfully enuciated in Toni Morrison's seventh and most recent novel to date, Paradise. That statement made by a man of God, Reverend Cary at the peak of depression and animosity in the seedy, fictional town of Ruby is indeed a testament of the community's deep-seated rejection of the development and influence of a convent of women separated from and independent of the rigid and patriarchal structures of the main community. In very significant ways, Paradise is an extended and inventive narrative repre- sentation of Morrison's idea of cultural iden- tity, history and memory; in this novel, the win- ner of the 1993 Nobel Prize for Literature has succeeded in telling old, familiar stories with jolting metaphors and refreshing panache. The characteristic Morrisonian text has a plural voiced narrator, reminiscent of oral storytelling pattern, with a multi-layered network of indi- vidual tales which coalesce into a grand nar- rative of community, communalism and, sex- ist and racial explorations. As an extended, yet organic, work, Para- dise reads like an intertextual consummation of an authorised project of envisioning a fe- male-centered world free from, impervious to or subsistent in spite of male hegemonic struc- tures. The idea of (a) potent female relationship(s) noticeable and which links such characters in filial bonding as Eva-Hannah- Sula (in Sula), Pilate-Reba-Hagar (in Song of Glendora Biokt Supplement 13 Solomon) and Baby Suggs - Sethe - Denver/ Beloved in (Beloved) is inventively and radi- cally deployed in Paradise such that Morrison moves beyond given biological associations to speak about affiliative connections between and among women of different generations and colour. It must be noted that affiliation, in the Saidian sense, is stronger and thicker than the proverbial blood of filiation. Thus, the various shades of loves shared between and among such female characters of Paradise as Lone Dupres - Consolata - Mary Magna, Mary Magna - Consolata, Consolata - Soane Morgan - Mavis - Gigi - Arnette... are more developed and sus- tained. Regarded as the final part of Morrison's nov- elistic trilogy on love coming after Beloved (1987) and Jazz (1991), Paradise is about sis- terhood, motherhood and the overaching memorisation of the cultural institution of sla- very coupled with its histories of migration and re-settlement. It is about women on the run, from men (and sometimes other women) in their cruel, conspiratorial, vindictive and vio- lent poses; it is also about the history of terri- torial claims and the theory of racial separat- ism. The girls and women whose lives are nar- rated in bits include Mavis Albright who lost her set of twins in an accident of forgetfulness and consequently felt paranoid or convinced that her other children encouraged by Frank (her husband) are all out to kill her; there is Arnette Fleetwood, a daughter of one of the original nine families in Ruby, too young when she got impregnated by K.D., there is Billie Delia who almost got killed by her own mother, Patricia Best; there is Pallas who ran away from home to the Convent to have her baby; and Gigi (Grace), and Seneca, and Connie (Consolata) who has always been Mother Superior's (Mary Magna) companion since the age of the nine. The moving spirit of the con- vent is Sister Mary Magna, an old fairy-like woman, once a devoted American nun who "kid- napped' or rescued three coloured children in 1925 from desolation and death on a South American street, left two of them in a Puerto Limon orphanage and retained the third one - Consolata - having developed a strong affec- tion for the child. She travelled with the girl to her new posting - an asylum/boarding school for Indian girls. Located in a remote part of North American West and known as CHRIST THE KING SCHOOL FOR NATIVE GIRLS, the institution soon lost its original function of making Catholics out of natives and it trans- formed into a Convent, a receptacle of Isroken girls, frightened girls, weak and lying'. (222) For women on the run or in tears, the Con- vent is a house of succour, fellowship and tran- quility where sorrows are shared and laugh- I ISSUE NUMBER THRE ft FOUR • 1998 • ters disseminated and spread in the sun; when 'the wind handled (them) like a man', the Con- vent is Paradise for 'crying women, staring women, scowling, lip-biting women or women just plain lost' (270). To the men of Ruby in- cluding the Morgan twins (Deacon and Stew- ard), Arnold and Jeff Fleetwood, Harper, Ser- geant Person and Reverend Cary, the Convent is an eerie school for witches, a coven of delu- sions where forms of perversions including sor- cery, infanticide, alco- holism, abortion and les- bianism are practiced. In the male imagina- tion, the place is seen as 'dark and malevolently disconnected from God's earth'(18). The New Fathers of Ruby, Oklahoma, in their 'odour of righteous- ness' are broadly por- trayed as misogynists for in the words of Patricia Best, 'every- thing that worries them must come from women' (217); reports of several outrages, from the comi- cal to the tragic, in Ruby are attributed to the presence of the Convent women. The misogynic tendency of Sargeant, for instance, is driven by a materialistic force to possess the inscrutably fertile Convent land, while Menus thinks that the only sure way of re- gaining his manhood or relevance is by unleash- ing violence on the women. Perhaps, this mi- sogynist figuration is so deployed in order re- assert the feminist discourse of shocking men out of a lethargy towards complementary gen- der relations. Yet the act of hateful suppres- sion of (the) female personae/association, bra- zenly displayed by the gang of nine is a subtle recognition, by men, of the latent powers of female fraternity - 'I know they got powers. Question is whose power is stronger. Why don't they just get on out, leave?' (275-6) In that fa- tal siege on the Convent, Consolata is killed while the fate of the other occupants floats between escape, massacre and disappearance depending on which version of that encounter is being retold. Thus, the Convent becomes fur- ther highlighted when in the last movement (strategically, untitled) of the novel, the women appear, with angelic brevity, to each of their Glendera Bosks Supplement 14 loved ones. Gigi converses with Daddy Man, Pallas appears before Dee Dee, Mavis shares a meal with Sally in a restaurant, and Seneca engages Jean in a talk about identity. In spite of the romantic verbalisation of the significant lives of the Convent women, the house of dream of paradise is shattered and abandoned. But the lesson of its destruction is contained in Reverend Misner's query of the Ruby onslaught ('How can they hold it to- gether... this hard-won heaven defined only by the absence of the unsaved...?) (306); the val- ues and the possibility of its possibility reside in Billie Delia's question - When will they re- appear, with blazing eyes... to rip up and stomp down this prison calling itself a town?' (308) and in Deacon Morgan's act of contrition for being an accomplice to the siege on the Con- vent. Above all, Toni Morrison has presented the inherent aspiration for peace, love and com- fort in the female psyche within what Francoise Lionnet has called a 'deep-seated cultural mi- sogyny and the potentially fatal consequences of practices... Which construct women as ob- jects of exchange' (Postcolonial Representations, 1995), (104). Generally, the narrative pattern of Para- dise is neither spiral nor locomotive as we find in Morrison's earlier novels; its pace is some- times jazzy, breezy or poetic, sometimes florid and certainly chess-like that its original out- lay may be qualified as cryptic and unusual; vignettes of tales are retold across sections/ chapters/movements (named after female char- acters) in such a manner that there are inter- vening echoes of one experiential subject in the other. The setting of the novel temporally spans eighty-seven years - (1890-1976) i.e. between Reconstruction period and post world wars and Black Power eras; spatially, stories revolve around the settlers of a place called New Ha- ven later named after Ruby a woman who died during the re-settlement of freed slaves. But more so, the virtual site of representation of women's lives is the Convent, a couple of miles on the outskirts of Ruby. The metaphor of the road which links the two sites, and the meta- phor of the castle which refers to the Convent and its supernatural halo are necessary for a determinate reproduction of meaning in the novel. In Bakhtinian terms, these are called chronotopes which serve as time-markers, and tropes of actions. The castle - Convent, for in- stance, is the point where palpable voices or figures or legends like the Circe-like Mother Superior are domestically contained ('the house was like a castle, full of a beauty...') (225); the other chronotope, that is, of parlors and salons, where webs of conspiracy are generated, relates directly to the Oven, the meeting point of the community where group exhortation against Toni Morrison Photograph by Kate Kunz ISSUE NUMBER THRE & FOUR • 1998 the Convent takes place. As a novel of cultural history and memorisation, Paradise describes in spurts the founding of Haven by freedmen who were shooed from one unfriendly town to another including wholly black communities until they acquired settlement in Arapaho territory; the story of later re-settlement and naming of the new territory is recounted through the reten- tive memories of Deacon and steward Morgan. The sharp practice of non-integration by mem- bers of the original nine (later disclosed as seven in a children's Xmas play) black fami- lies of settlers in New Haven is here presented as a sign of some conservative separatism. The racial argument has always been to keep the blood pure black. The 8-rock, as they are known, wanted to maintain an unbroken continuity in the bio- logical relationships which certainly could not last, for each error of miscegenation, it is the woman who gets blamed and stigmatised. This dogmatic desire for a non-intergrationist para- dise in Ruby is sharply contrasted in the Con- vent by a transcendental group of women who are linked more by mind than by pigmenta- tion. Mavis and Arnette are black, Mother Superior and Grace are white and Consolata is Latin - American (Chicano?) Apart from this anti-racist racism dili- gently upheld by the 8-rock , an aspect of cul- tural polemics touched upon in Paradise is the diasporan/diffusionist argument about the his- torical connection of America to Africa. The argument is dialogised in the differing views held by Patricia Best who disregards any cul- tural devotion to 'a foreign country" and Rev- erend Richard Misner who believes in engage- ment, in seeking the knowledge of the past (209-10). Another dimension of cultural memorisation is practically demonstrated in the shifting representation of the original motto (as written on the Oven) of the early settlers - 'Beware the Furrow of His Brow' - which changed or is mis-read as 'Be the Fur- row of His Brow' and which is later trans- formed into a declaration graffiti - *We Are the Furrow of His Brow' - by the younger genera- tion of the community. This attests to the dy- namic structure of society and particularly the shift of consciousness from puritanism to blas- phemy. Paradise is also about revenant presences and magical or supernatural acts. Mary Magna/Mother Superior attains an angelic if not ghostly figuration so that the love relation- ship between her and Consolata seems to be that of a goddess and a worshipper. Consolata herself is described, after Superior's passage, as 'a new and revised Reverend Mother'. (265) She acquires an extrasensory power of resus- Glendon Biaki Supplement 15 citation from Lone Dupres who guides her to 'step in... to find the pinpoint of light' to revive dead or sick persons (245). It is this gift of ESP that Consolata employs to resurrect Scout Morgan and prolong the life of Mother Supe- rior. Invariably, the outlines of affiliative rela- tionship between Mary Magna - Consolata, and Consolata-Lone is at once ethereal and magical; by extension, the relationship be- tween Consolata and Soane Morgan is de- scribed as fast friendship, in spite of her erotic association with Soane's husband and because of her ability to 'step in' and save the Morgan kid from dying. The reader of Paradise may be tempted to see it as a paradoxical text stringed with iro- nies and contradictions: a community in search of order but desirous of creating chaos in an- other community on grounds of some evil imag- ined; or a self-sustaining paradisiac commune occupied by liars, abortionists, lip-biters, in- fant-killers and nudists. Nothing is left but re- morse and guilt in Ruby and a haunted empti- ness in the Convent. And by banishing the dream of paradise from the Convent, the proud men of Ruby have themselves lost a huge part of their own humanity. However, the novel ends with a flash of Piedade's blissful song filled with both memory and hope of attaining a new paradise - 'the ease of coming back to love be- gun'. (318) As the last part of the author's trilogy on love coming close to the end of the century, Paradise is arguably a textual confirmation of Morrison's deep concern for the varied nego- tiations of maternal as well as feminine filia- tions and affiliations within defined commu- nities. The novel is not only an extended form of the Morrison artistic vision, it is also a very ambitious and complicating text in terms of its representation of cultural and individual histories, journeyings, flights as well as its basic trope on naming (of persons and places); practically complicating so, in terms of its chess-like narrative pattern which portrays, with nearly equal intensity, the related lives and motions of families and individuals from Haven to New Haven/Ruby and the Convent between the 1890s and the 1970s. By termi- nation the narrative of Paradise in the 1970s, the decade which marked the rise of black fe- male prose writing in America, Toni Morrison seems to have completed, metaphorically speaking, .a phase of African American black women's representation, repossession, identity, integration-and possibilities. Raji-Oyelade, a poet, is chairman. Association of Nigerian Authors in Oyo State.