Authors: Cornel West
Democracy Matters (12 page)
Morrison’s exploration of the heart of American darkness is most essentially a search for the possibility of democratic community—a vision of everyday people renouncing narrow self-interest and creating a web of caring under harsh American circumstances. Morrison notes:
Those people could not live without value. They had prices, but no value in the white world, so they made their own, and they decided what was valuable. It was usually eleemosynary [charitable], usually something they were doing for somebody else. Nobody in the novel, no adult black person, survives by self-regard, narcissism, selfishness. They took the sense of community for granted. It never occurred to them they could live outside of it.
Morrison’s debt to Melville is quite conscious and deliberate. He was the first American literary artist to explore whiteness as an ideology and its traumatic effects on blacks and whites. As she writes in her pioneering literary critical text
Playing in the Dark
(1992):
And if the white whale is the ideology of race, what Ahab has lost to it is personal dismemberment and family and society and his own place as a human in the world. The trauma of racism is, for the racist and the victim, the severe fragmentation of the self and has always seemed to me a cause (not a symptom) of psychosis.
In Morrison’s vision, it is fear and insecurity that drive the dogmatisms and nihilisms of imperial elites like Ahab, and love and hope that bind democratic communities in response to the offenses of imperial power and might. Melville’s artistic integrity and democratic courage left him “very alone, very desperate and very doomed” in mid-nineteenth-century America. As Morrison comments about Melville’s effort:
To question the very notion of white progress, the very idea of racial superiority, of whiteness as privileged place in the evolutionary ladder of humankind, and to meditate on the fraudulent, self-destroying philosophy of that superiority, to “pluck it out from under the robes of Senators and Judges,” to drag the “judge himself to the bar”—that was dangerous, solitary, radical work. Especially then. Especially now.
But rather than encouraging either revenge or despair, Morrison, like Baldwin, puts forth a vision of black democratic identity rooted in a love that embraces all—a love and trust that
holds together a democratic community and society. When asked what is her favorite metaphor for her work, she replied:
Love. We have to embrace ourselves…. James Baldwin once said, “You’ve already been bought and paid for. Your ancestors already gave it up for you. You don’t have to do that anymore. Now you can love yourself.”…
That’s why we’re here. We have to do something nurturing that we respect, before we go. We must. It is more interesting, more complicated, more intellectually demanding and more morally demanding to love somebody. To take care of somebody….
What is interesting to me is that under the circumstances in which the people in my books live there is this press toward love.
Morrison’s powerful portraits of community—also enhanced by her Catholicism—speak to the need for citizens in a democracy to be socially engaged, to involve ourselves with one another’s lives. Her message of democratic love resists the narrow arrogance and self-interest of the nihilism taking hold of our society. The most free and democratic character in Morrison’s eight powerful novels—Pilate in
Song of Solomon
(1978)—says on her deathbed, “I wish I’d a knowed more people. I would have loved ’em all. If I’d a knowed more, I would a loved more.” In a commentary on Pilate, Morrison clearly displays her Baldwinian ethic of love and her democratic faith:
That’s a totally generous free woman. She’s fearless. She’s not afraid of anything. She has very few material things. She has a little self-supporting skill that she performs. She doesn’t run anybody’s life. She’s available for almost infinite love. If you need her—she’ll deliver. And she has complete clarity about who she is.
For Morrison, this belief in the capacity of everyday people to forge personal dignity and in the power of democratic community to resist the abuse of elite power is the core of America’s deep democratic tradition. Like Baldwin, she sees this belief most readily manifest in the black musical tradition. The dangerous freedom embedded in the performance of musical artists is a form of taking back one’s powers in the face of one’s apparent powerlessness. Morrison notes:
My notion of love…is very closely related to blues. There’s always somebody leaving somebody, and there’s never any vengeance, any bitterness…. It’s quite contrary to the overwhelming notion of love that’s the business of the majority culture.
She is our premier literary musician, and her texts are communal experiences in which the audience participates in and with her performance.
Morrison’s aim is to spark in the reader a desire to explore the rich human depths of a dehumanized people, to revel in the forms
of linguistic delicacies alongside their social miseries, and to be unsettled by the hypocrisy of an American chamber of horrors as the empire trumpets liberty and opportunity for all. That is why she places so much stress on the cadences of the human voice in her works. As in the blues, this emphasis asserts the dignity and individuality of her characters; it allows us to see inside them and demands that we listen to them. To hear the nuances of voice is to gain some access to the humanity of individuals. To listen closely to the tones of voice is to be open to the interiority of persons. Her democratic mission is to heal—yet to shatter moral numbness and awaken sleepwalking hurts. As she writes: “Anything dead coming back to life hurts.” As Ellison wrote, the purpose is to “keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness” in order to be able to transcend that pain. She enacts on the page what black blues singers perform on the stage—with similar strategies of repetitive refrains, rhythmic language, syncopated sounds, and dark laughter. She writes about her intent:
My efforts to make aural literature—A-U-R-A-L—work because I do hear it…it has to
sound
and if it doesn’t
sound
right…
So I do a lot of revision when I write in order to clean away the parts of the book that can
only
work as print. It has to have certain kinds of fundamental characteristics (one of) which is the participation of the
other
, that is, the audience, the reader, and that you can do with a spoken story.
Morrison’s subtle grounding in black musical forms poses a serious challenge to her readers. Her books require readers to take part in them. Even a critic as sophisticated and astute as Harold Bloom—usually supremely confident in his literary critiques—openly ponders: “I do not believe that Morrison writes fiction of a kind I am not yet competent to read and judge….”
Morrison’s books can also be almost too painful to bear. She transfigures the blues cry in the dark depths with “circles and circles of sorrow.” But, as with blues artists, she tells us: “If you surrendered to the air, you could
ride
it.” And despite their difficulty, her books have become bestsellers, read avidly by blacks, whites, and others, which is a great testament to the democratic potential residing within the American public.
Morrison’s fundamental democratic insight is that there can be democratic dialogue only when one is open to the humanity of individuals and to the interiority of their personalities. Like the blues, Morrison assumes the full-fledged humanity of black people—a revolutionary gesture in a racist civilization—and thereby dethrones the superior status of whites. This assumption liberates both blacks and whites and enables them to embark on a candid, though painful, engagement with life and death, joy and sorrow, resistance and domination, hope and despair in the American empire. Like her beloved Faulkner, Morrison takes us into the underworld and underground of the American Disney World to lay bare the lives of those ambushed by disillusionment and hampered by disappointment.
Morrison is a democratic subversive because she shuns all
forms of authority that suppress the flowering of unique individuality. She heralds all kinds of free self-creations that take seriously quests for wisdom and justice. Her insistence on the need to appreciate the plights and values of all people is a vital guide as we attempt to instill democracy in the Middle East, a region riven by issues of offended identity.
Our democracy is certainly in horrible disrepair, and the disengagement of so many, along with the flight into superficial forms of entertainment and life satisfaction, is understandable. But the deep love of and commitment to democracy expressed by these great artists and the long tradition of scrutinizing the ravages of our imperialism are strong.
The anger and disillusionment that so many Americans have felt toward the Bush administration, especially in regard to the dishonest manipulation in launching the Iraq war, is not a narrowly partisan affair. It is not a matter of the typical polarization of party politics. The passion evoked by the administration comes out of deep commitment to democratic ideals. If the administration had not been betraying those ideals, it would not have had to lie to the public in order to generate support for the war. The impassioned critique on the part of so many Americans of the current American militarism is a testament to just how alive and intense the public commitment to democracy is.
Though the saturation of American market-driven culture around the world has obscured the deep democratic strain in American life, it is in fact in America where democratic intellectuals have had the deepest tradition and greatest impact. The most
profound democratic artist and intellectual—Anton Chekhov—did not live in a democratic experiment. We can be inspired by his democratic genius—as seen in his massive popularity in our time—but our American context does not require that we try to get a democratic experiment off the ground (as he did); rather, we must sustain and refine ours before it falls to the ground.
Since American civilization is first and foremost a business culture—a market-driven society—its elected officials and corporate elites are preoccupied with economic growth and national prosperity. That is why it has been primarily artistic, activist, and intellectual voices from outside the political and economic establishments who have offered the most penetrating insights and energizing visions and have pushed the development of the American democratic project.
That deep tradition of democratic artists, activists, and intellectuals is very much alive and well. We have great playwrights like Tony Kushner, August Wilson, and Arthur Miller who never lose sight of democratic individuality as they probe the underside of American life; grand novelists such as Thomas Pynchon, Russell Banks, and of course Toni Morrison who disclose the workings of struggling democratic communities in the face of elite power; major filmmakers like Charles Burnett and the Wachowski brothers who give us a glimpse of crisis-ridden democratic societies in the wake of our information age; and towering social critics like Noam Chomsky and Susan Sontag who wed the humanist tradition to democratic ideals. When Marian Wright Edelman fights to eliminate child poverty, William Greider calls for pension funds to be
used to support socially responsible enterprises, Angela Davis questions the role of prisons, Barbara Ehrenreich highlights the plight of the working poor, Dolores Huerta promotes unionization of immigrant workers, or Ralph Nader fights for democratic accountability of corporations, we know the imperialist strain in American life can be resisted. Most important, when visionary and courageous citizens see through the dogmas and nihilisms of those who rule us and join together to pursue democratic individuality, progress can be made in our communities and our society. The deep democratic tradition in America that these and so many other of our most challenging and prophetic artists have called forth and kept alive is the greatest gift of America to the world.
The moral outrage provoked by the arrogant militaristic policies, pro-rich tax cuts, and authoritarian excesses of the Bush administration arise out of this deep well of democratic commitment and are a hopeful sign that a democratizing resurgence may be under way. And it is neither naive nor quixotic to talk about a democratic awakening in the face of the corruption shot through our political and economic system. Our history shows that stirring the deep commitment to democratic values and mandates does make a difference. But we must not confuse this democratic commitment with flag-waving patriotism. The former is guided by common virtues forged by ordinary citizens, the latter by martial ideals promoted by powerful elites. Democratic commitment confronts American hypocrisy and mendacity in the name of public interest; flag-waving patriotism promotes American innocence and purity in the name of national glory.
As we embark on a bold and questionable endeavor to implant democracy in the Middle East, the vital perspectives and admonitions about the painful limits and sometimes brutal arrogance of our own American democracy offered by these profound democratic voices—themselves inspired by and in rich communion with the prophetic voices of the American democratic tradition—must guide us to strive to appreciate the cultural and political complexities of the societies we are so brazenly trying to reshape. The profound insights into the ways in which American democracy has itself condoned disenfranchising practices and created space for brutal suppression of the democratic rights not only of blacks but of Native Americans, Asian and Latino laborers, and European immigrants, and the painful insights into the devastating long-term material and psychic effects of that treatment, must inform our approach to the goal of spreading democracy around the globe. We will likely stoke more resentment in the Middle East than fires of democratic passion if we are not sensitive to the special characteristics out of which democracy must evolve there.
We should not be seduced by the simplistic and self-serving statements from the Bush administration about the commitment to instill democracy in Afghanistan and Iraq—with grand references to spreading democracy throughout the rest of the Middle East—as though democracy is something that can be so easily imposed from the outside, not the least by an arrogant superpower with dubious motives. That is not the true voice of the American democratic tradition; that is the voice of the American imperial tradition. But just as there are powerful voices for democratic progress in the American tradition, both past and present, so there
are powerful voices of wisdom and dissent within the Middle East. The need for democratic identities in the Jewish and Islamic worlds looms large, and one of the most urgent questions for democrats in America who oppose the arrogant militarism of the Bush administration is, how can we take back our country so that the deep democratic tradition in America can help forge these democratic identities abroad and be a force for peace and justice in that troubled part of the world?
