Historically the language of religion (and I am speaking here of Christianity, but I am relatively certain this is true of all text-based religions) is dependent upon and gains its strength, beauty, and unassailability from biblical or holy texts. Contemporary religious language, that is the speech and the script that seeks to translate divine translations into “popular” or “everyday common” parlance, seems to work best in song, in anecdote, and in the occasional rhetorical flourish. I understand that the reason for modernizing the traditional language of the Bible is an effort to connect with and proselytize a population indifferent or unresponsive to the language that moved our ancestors. To compete for the attention of a constituency whose discourse has been shaped by the language of media and commerce and whose expectation of correlating images to accompany and clarify text is a difficult enterprise. And it appears reasonable to accommodate altering circumstances with alternate modes of discourse. While I can’t testify to the success of such efforts, I suspect the “modernization” of God’s language has been rewarding—otherwise these attempts would not be so plentiful.
Marketing religion requires new strategies, new appeals, and a relevance that is immediate, not contemplative. Thus modern language, while successful in the acquisition of converts and the spiritual maintenance of the confirmed, is forced to kneel before the denominator that is most accessible, to bankrupt its subtlety, its mystery in order to bankroll its effect. Nevertheless it seems a poor substitute for the language it seeks to replace, not only because it sacrifices ambiguity, depth, and moral authority, but also because its techniques are reinforcement rather than liberation.
I do not mean to suggest that there are no brilliant sermons, powerfully intelligent essays, revelatory poems, moving encomiums, or elegant arguments. Of course there are. Nor do I mean to suggest that there is no personal language, no prayer that is not stunning in its creativity, its healing properties, its sheer intellectual power. But these rhetorical forms are not suitable for sustained prose fiction. Modern narrative is devoid of religious language that does not glean most of its nourishment from allusions to or quotations from holy texts.
Is it possible to write religion-inflected prose narrative that does not rest its case entirely or mainly on biblical language? Is it possible to make the experience and journey of faith fresh, as new and as linguistically unencumbered as it was to early believers, who themselves had no collection of books to rely on?
I have chosen this task, this obligation partly because I am alarmed at the debasement of religious language in literature; its cliché-ridden expression, its apathy, its refusal to refuel itself with nonmarket vocabulary (or “its insistence on refueling itself with marketing vocabulary”), its substitution of the terminology of popular psychology for philosophical clarity; its patriarchal triumphalism, its morally bankrupt dictatorial praxis, the unearned congratulations it awards itself for performability rather than content; its low opinion of its mission.
How can a novelist represent bliss in nonsexual, nonorgiastic terms? How can a novelist, in a land of plenty, render undeserved, limitless love, the one “that passeth all understanding,” without summoning the consumer pleasure of a lotto win? How to invoke paradise in an age of theme parks?
The answer, unfortunately, is that, so far, I cannot. I chose something else, some other means of freshening the inquiry. I chose not only to explore the idea of paradise, but to interrogate the narrow imagination that has conceived it.
But that, I think, is another essay entirely.
On Beloved
I began thinking about Beloved in 1983. As it had been since the beginning of my writing years, I was drawn to it by my complicated relationship with history. A relationship that was wary, alert, but ready to be persuaded away from doubt. It was a caution based on my early years as a student, during which time I was keenly aware of erasures and absences and silences in the written history available to me—silences that I took for censure. History, it seemed, was about them. And if I or someone representative of myself ever were mentioned in fiction, it was usually something I wished I had skipped. Not just in the works of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Mark Twain’s unconscionable humiliation of a grown man at the hands of children; there was no respite in those years even in the encyclopedia or in history texts. While I maintain a cool eye while reading historical texts, it is an eye no cooler than the one historians maintain, and ought to maintain when reading fiction. Yet in spite of my wariness, my skepticism, there is a dependence, solid and continuous, that I have on history, partly for the data available to me there, but mostly for precisely those gaps, those erasures, that censure. It is in the interstices of recorded history that I frequently find the “nothing” or the “not enough” or the “indistinct” or “incomplete” or “discredited” or “buried” information important to me. For example, in 1963, my first novel, The Bluest Eye, was a consequence of being overcome by the wholesale dismissal of a certain part of the population (to which I belonged) in history texts and literature. Of all the characters chosen for artistic examination, with empathy or contempt, vulnerable young black girls were profoundly absent. When they did appear, they were jokes or instances of pity—pity without understanding. No one it seemed missed their presence center stage and no one it seemed took them seriously except me. Now, I didn’t blame literature for that. Writers write what they like and what interests them. And even African American writers (mostly men, but not all) made clear that, except as background, prepubescent black girls were unable to hold their interest or stimulate their curiosity. Nevertheless, writers’ lack of curiosity was not the point. To me the enforced or chosen silence, the way history was written, controlled and shaped the national discourse.
However much historical analysis has changed (and it has changed enormously) and broadened in the last forty years, the silences regarding certain populations (minorities) when finally articulated are still understood to be supplementary accounts of a marginal experience, a supplemental record, unassociated with the mainstream of history; an expanded footnote, as it were, that is interesting but hardly central to the nation’s past. Racial history, for example, remains very much parallel to main historical texts, but is seldom seen as either its warp or woof, and seldom threaded into the whole cloth. These ancillary and parallel texts are gaining wide readership while remaining the site of considerable controversy. (Debates about reading material swirled in many high schools.) Although the silences provoked virtually all of my work, inhabiting them with one’s own imagination is easy to note, not so easy to do. I have to find the hook, the image, the newspaper article that produces sustained musing, a “what if?” or “what must it have been like?”
Beloved originated as a general question, and was launched by a newspaper clipping. The general question (remember, this was the early eighties) centered on how—other than equal rights, access, pay, etc.—does the women’s movement define the freedom being sought? One principal area of fierce debate was control of one’s own body—an argument that is as rife now as it was then. Many women were convinced that such rights extended to choosing to be a mother, suggesting that not being a mother was not a deficit and choosing motherlessness (for however long) could be added to a list of freedoms; that is, one could choose to live a life free of and from childbearing and no negative or value judgment need apply.
Another aspect of the women’s movement involved strong encouragement of women to support other women. Not to have one’s relationship to another woman be subordinate to a relationship with a man. That is, the time spent with a female friend was not downtime. It was real time.
The completion of the debate was more complicated than that (there was much class conflict roiling in it) but those were the issues surfacing with gusto. I addressed the second one (women being important friends) in Sula. But the first one—freedom as ownership of the body, childlessness chosen as a mark of freedom, engaged me deeply.
And here again the silences of historical accounts a
nd the marginalizing of minority peoples in the debate claimed my attention and proved a rich being to explore. From the point of view of slave women, for example. Suppose having children, being called a mother, was the supreme act of freedom—not its opposite? Suppose instead of being required to have children (because of gender, slave status, and profit) one chose to be responsible for them; to claim them as one’s own; to be, in other words, not a breeder, but a parent. Under U.S. slavery such a claim was not only socially unacceptable, it was illegal, anarchic. It was also an expression of intolerable female independence. It was freedom. And if the claim extended to infanticide (for whatever reason—noble or crazed) it could and did become politically explosive.
These lines of thought came together when I recalled a newspaper article I had read around 1970, a description of an abolitionist cause célèbre focused on a slave woman named Margaret Garner who had indeed made such claims. The details of her life were riveting. But I selected and manipulated its parts to suit my own purposes. Still my reluctance to enter the period of slavery was disabling. The need to reexamine and imagine it was repellent. Plus, I believed nobody else would want to dig deeply into the interior lives of slaves, except to summon their nobility or victimhood, to be outraged or self-righteously gripped by pity. I was interested in neither. The act of writing is a kind of act of faith.
Sometimes what is there—what is already written—is perfect and imitation is absurd and intolerable. But a perfect thing is not everything. Another thing, another different thing is required. Sometimes what is already there is simply not enough; other times it is indistinct, incomplete, even in error or buried. Sometimes, of course, there is nothing. And for a novelist that is the real excitement. Not what there is, but what there is not.
A tall door rises up into this nothing; its hardware is heavy, secure. No bell invites your hand. So you stand there, perhaps, or move away and, later, sticking your hand in your pocket, you find a key that you know (or hope) fits the lock. Even before the tumblers fall back you know you will find what you hoped to find: a word or two that turns the “not enough” into more; the line or sentence that inserts itself into the nothing. With the right phrase, this sense becomes murky, becomes lit, differently lit. Through that door is a kind of freedom that can frighten governments, sustain others, and rid whole nations of confusion. More important, however, is that the writer who steps through that door with the language of his or her own intellect and imagination enters uncolonized territory, which she can claim as rightfully her own—for a while at least.
The shared effort to avoid imagining slave life as lived from their own point of view became the subtheme, the structure of the work. Forgetting the past was the engine, and the characters (except for one) are intent on forgetting. The one exception being the one hungry for a past, desperate for being not just remembered, but dealt with, confronted. That character would be the only one in a position to accurately render judgment of her own murder: the dead child. Beloved. Thus, after following a number of trails trying to determine the structure, I decided that the single most uncontroversial thing one can say about the institution of slavery vis-à-vis contemporary time, is that it haunts us all. That in so many ways all our lives are entangled with the past—its manipulations and, fearful of its grasp, ignoring or dismissing or distorting it to suit ourselves, but always unable to erase it. When finally I understood the nature of a haunting—how it is both what we yearn for and what we fear, I was able to see the traces of a ghostly presence, the residue of a repressed past in certain concrete but also allusive detail. Footprints particularly. That disappear and return only to disappear again. The endings of my novels have to be clear in my mind before I begin. So I was able to describe this haunting even before I knew everything that would lead up to it.
Chinua Achebe
I take great pleasure in having this opportunity to say some things in public that I have never said to the person who is the subject of these comments—Chinua Achebe. My debt to Mr. Achebe is the best kind. Large, minus repayment schedule, and interest-free. Let me describe it to you.
In 1965 I began reading African literature, devouring it actually. It was a literature previously unavailable to me, but by then I had discovered a New York bookstore called Africa House, which offered among other things back issues of Transition, Black Orpheus, and works by a host of African writers from all over the continent. Amos Tutuola, Ayi Kwei Armah, Ezekiel Mphahlele, James Ngugi, Bessie Head, Christina Ama Ata Aidoo, Mongo Beti, Léopold Senghor, Camara Laye, Ousmane Sembène, Wole Soyinka, John Pepper Clark: the jolt these writers gave me was explosive. The confirmation that African literature was not limited to Doris Lessing and Joseph Conrad was so stunning it led me to secure the aid of two academics who could help me anthologize this literature. At that time African literature was not a subject to be taught in American schools. Even in so-called world literature courses it had no reputation and no presence. But I was determined to funnel the delight, the significance, and the power of that literature into my work as an editor. The publication of Contemporary African Literature in 1972 was the beginning of my love affair.
But the more profound and more personal consequence was the impact Chinua Achebe’s novels had on my own beginnings as a writer. I had read his essay in Transition, on the struggle with definitions of African literature, and knew its ramifications for African American writers. In that essay, Achebe quoted James Baldwin’s comments on the subject of language choice and manipulation in defining national and cultural literatures and its resonance with marginalized writers. “My quarrel,” said Baldwin, “with the English language has been that the language reflected none of my experience …. Perhaps … I had never attempted to use it, had only learned to imitate it. If this were so, then it might be made to bear the burden of my experience if I could find the stamina to challenge it, and me, to such a test.” But theorizing a definition is one thing. Executing a theory is another. Achebe’s “answer,” so to speak, was in his work. He (along with Camara Laye, Bessie Head, and others) constituted a complete education for me. Learning how to disassemble the gaze that I was wrestling with (the habitual but self-conscious writing toward a nonblack reader that threatened and coated much African American literature); discovering how to eliminate, to manipulate the Eurocentric eye in order to stretch and plumb my own imagination; I attribute these learned lessons to Chinua Achebe. In the pages of Things Fall Apart lay not the argument but the example; in the pages of No Longer at Ease, Anthills of the Savannah the assumption of the authenticity, the force, the valleys of beauty were abundant. Achebe’s work liberated my artistic intelligence as nothing else had ever done. I became fit to reenter and reinhabit my own milieu without the services of a native guide.
So in fact that was not a debt in 1965. It was a gift.
Introduction of Peter Sellars
Peter Sellars warned me against any ideas I might be forming about this introduction. He strongly suggested two and only two sentences: “Thank you for coming.” And “Here’s Peter Sellars.”
I defy him at my peril, but I appeal to what Peter might be stunned to learn is “a higher authority.”
I happen to know Peter Sellars’s mother. Have met her several times in several countries. She is, in a word, lovely. And suspecting the difficult joy of rearing sons—whether in Pennsylvania, where Peter was born, or Denver, Colorado, where he directed Beethoven from the podium his father built for him, or Phillips Andover, or Harvard directing Coriolanus, collecting a Phi Beta Kappa key and an invitation to direct at the American Repertory Theater at the Loeb; or studying in Japan, China, and India; or being director of the Boston Shakespeare Company, the American National Theater, the Kennedy Center; or receiving a MacArthur award. I say—suspecting a mother’s difficult joy, I am certain she would take the same pleasure I do in hearing an introduction of one’s son a bit more expansive. So, out of affection for Mrs. Sellars, an English professor, I am going to bow to her authority and I hope her desir
e and add a few sentences to the two her son seriously recommended to me.
We go to art sometimes for safety, for a haven of order, serenity; for recognizable, even traditional beauty; for anticipation with certainty that the art form will take us past our mundane selves into a deepness where we also reside.
We go, sometimes, to art for danger; to be riveted by experiencing the strange, by understanding suddenly how uncanny the familiar really is. We go to be urged, shaken into reassessing thoughts we have taken for granted; to learn other ways of seeing, hearing. To be excited. Stirred. Disturbed.
Fortunately for us, among contemporary artists, Peter Sellars is rare: he never asks us to make those choices; he does not require us to select the red/green, food/no food buttons of mice in a laboratory, the one of two oppositional kinds of pleasure or power or genius we want. His work has always displayed both safety and danger; both the haven of the recognizable and the unchartered terrain of the disfamiliarized.
His almost pious devotion to the original score, the complete script, the uncommercial length (which pays a public the compliment of assuming its attention span—its memory bank—is longer than that of a housefly). In his fidelity, his respect for the work itself, we find safety, reassurance.
His deeply held conviction that profound art—whatever its date of origin—is always contemporary permits us fresh access to that nostrum when he chips away the encrustations of time and use to expose its truth. Whether it is Mozart’s Le Nozze de Figaro, Don Giovanni, Così fan Tutti; Handel’s Julius Caesar in Egypt; Kurt Weill’s Seven Deadly Sins; Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice; Wagner’s Ring; Gogol’s Inspector General—whatever. By collapsing these otherwise mutually exclusive approaches to art’s work—fidelity and resuscitation; safety and danger; thorough scholarship with outrageously innovative stagecraft; astonishingly incisive personal interpretation with an almost impertinent trust in actors’ instincts. Because of his ability to embrace both approaches, we are made aware of how irresistible art is. We are made aware of his reverence for its possibilities—to keep us sane or make us so. His absolute love of it. His total faith in it. And in us.
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