Toni Morrison wrote about her people. Her black people. Black people are not a race. They are simply, people. They are people with a different shade of colour. In America, Morrison discovered colour is the name of belonging, or not-belonging. America is defined by colour. In God Help the Child (2015), the lighter skinned mother is scared of the “midnight-black” skin of her daughter and says, “Her colour is a cross she will always carry.” Black was not just a colour but a scare, marked by the fears of acceptance. In real life, Morrison’s says of her great-grandmother who was very black: “She found lighter-skinned blacks to be impure—which was the opposite of what the world was saying about skin color and the hierarchy of skin color.” It is a reverse psyche regarding the colour black among black people that reveals a reverse hierarchy of belonging. Colour, like caste, is a notion. It is a notion before it becomes, before it translates into, other things, before it turns into structures of exploitation. Racism does not allow colour to remain colour, to remain “natural”. Caste, unlike colour, is artificially invented. But casteism, like racism, is a notion of difference. Caste colours the gaze, just as colour colours the gaze. Race is the notional colouring of colour. Race is the paranoia and disgust of difference. Race is violence upon colour.

Race colours reason

Morrison laid bare the devastating repercussions of this notion in novel after novel. And yet, her black women were bold enough to live their madness. In The Bluest Eye (1970), the African-American girl, Pecola, regarded “ugly”, battling an inferiority complex, did not hesitate to make the ridiculous and touching request to the mystic if he could give her blue eyes. Looking for beauty makes you pitiable. A desperation that you did not create, that others forced upon you, leads you to look for escape, for reinvention, for magic: “Beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do.”

Morrison holds a different, shaky mirror before the world through her intense women characters. When Morrison reflects on why Pecola and her family suffer from the physical anxiety of being unattractive, we nod with her:

“You looked at them and wondered why they were so ugly; you looked closely and could not find the source. Then you realized that it came from conviction, their conviction. It was as though some mysterious all-knowing master had given each one a cloak of ugliness to wear, and they had each accepted it without question.”

In The Antichrist, Nietzsche argues the genealogical roots of conviction are steeped in self-delusion: “What if falsehood be also one of these embryonic forms of conviction?—Sometimes all that is needed is a change in persons: what was a lie in the father becomes a conviction in the son” [Section 55]. There are forces that play a role in convincing people what they lack, inferiorising them in their own eyes, as much as the opposite, making people believe in self and race pride. The people who declare others ugly monopolise the idea of beauty. The “mysterious all-knowing master” of historically ordained conviction, is the voice of reason that internalises and externalises the notion of prejudice based on colour and enforces it on themselves, and other people. The notion that masters history and its consciousness establishes the order of things. It is this order that freedom seeks to challenge and upturn: to reverse the gaze and the notion of things, of what is beautiful and ugly, of what is superior and inferior, of what is acceptable and what is not.

What makes the all-knowing master “mysterious”? The roots of historical reason are mysterious, because reason is guided by notions. Despite the empire of reason beginning its reign since the 18th century, has racism ebbed, disappeared? On the contrary, the violence continues. Reason cannot alter the notion that both precedes it and instills it. Reason is a cover-up of notions. In Annihilation of Caste, Ambedkar raised a striking question:

“Can you appeal to reason, and ask the Hindus to discard Caste as being contrary to reason? That raises the question: Is a Hindu free to follow his reason?”

The second question, I have mentioned elsewhere, introduces a prerequisite to the ability to use reason: In order to use reason, you have to be free. The Hindu is not free to use reason because he is tied to his notion of caste. Similarly, we can ask with Morrison, can white men and women claim pure reason on their side, a reason devoid of notions of colour? If freedom from notions alone guarantees a pure status to reason, history tells us that pure reason does not exist.

Race limits and colours reason.

The “mysterious” element about the master who afflicts people with racism lies in the nature of the narrative. Explaining the perplexity, Morrison says in her interview to The Paris Review: “I did this lecture for my students that took me forever, which was tracking all the moments of withheld, partial, or disinformation, when a racial fact or clue sort of comes out but doesn’t quite arrive. I just wanted to chart it. I listed its appearance, disguise, and disappearance on every page”. Racism is real and visible, but its narrative is always as slippery as a tail, as slippery as the genealogy of conviction.

The black soul of jazz

Black music poses one such challenge to the narrative of race. In Jazz (1992), Morrison starts with the sentence on Violet: “Sth, I know that woman. She used to live with a flock of birds on Lenox Avenue”. The narrator stands between her character and reader, suggesting and demanding a relationship of trust. That trust is simply the trust in the storyteller. It is also a subtle invitation to read the sensual language of music. Here too, we face the question of notion and prejudice.

Jazz, Morrison reminds us, was “considered… devil music; too sensual and provocative, and so on. But for some black people jazz meant claiming their own bodies.” That makes jazz the music of discordance, urban and yet not in tune with the urban, separated by a radically other experience, in the interstices between how to be black, and how to be seen as black. The city is a dangerous lure. The signs of the city both intensify and blur the possibilities of experience: “The City is smart at this: smelling and good and looking raunchy; sending secret messages disguised as public signs: this way, open here, danger to let colored only single men on sale woman wanted private room stop dog on premises absolutely no money down fresh chicken free delivery fast.” The city is hallucinatory, and Morrison throws it open for us, its racism, its promise, its loves and its despairs.

Jazz is dangerous. It is the “dirty get-on-down music” that Alice Manfred speaks of in Jazz. It can incite violence. Jazz is prone to the dark forces of history and life that creates it. In jazz, the body sings the soul sings the body. There is no metaphysics in jazz. It is the soul of experience. There is no pure reason in jazz, only response to what is violated. The beauty of jazz, like all things beautiful in the world of Morrison, is what confronts and refuses the ugliness of racism. The soul in this music is in conversation with the history of slavery and with the body that springs from the depths of blackness. Jazz represents what is original in black history, with its own version of the gospel and the blues.

It is no accident that in Jazz the characters are wounded by love. Since jazz is the music of experience, it is haunted by memory. Morrison’s abiding motif in her novels is how wounds scar memory. Her characters grapple with memory like it was a real thing. In Beloved, Sethe experiences “re-memory” as a psychic form of reclaiming the past from the mysterious, all-knowing master, a reconstruction through recapitulation. Re-memory is the trace that remains after the signs of memory have been violated. It is both personal and collective, rebuilding the lost home in language from scratch. Apart from black history, we find its recurrence in the lives of refugees, of all territorially dispossessed people.

The other is our future

Deeply connected to the narrative of race and memory, is the concept of the other, of blacks entering the discourse of history as the racial other. In The Origin of Others (2017), a compilation of The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, Morrison writes: “Since no one is born a racist and there is no fetal predisposition to sexism, one learns Othering not by lecture or instruction but by example.” Othering is the curse of representation. We are back to the idea of “notion” that enables racist and casteist discourses. The other is not an identity, properly speaking, but a lack of identity. The other is named in advance, before she names herself.

In her last book of nonfiction, Mouth Full Of Blood (2019), Morrison expands her concern for the others in history. Technology, she writes, has enabled us to see, communicate and support others, but “the fear of dispossession, the loss of citizenship remains.” We may add, the technology that connects people has also intensified older forms of paranoia that are generated by proximities. The more universal the mode of language, the deeper the alienation. This is akin to Heidegger’s thesis that technology has hastened the feeling of homelessness. We are no longer using language to understand each other, but to mis-construct and mis-understand others. Solidarity and alienation are no longer opposite states of being, but part of our schizophrenia. We have lost the ethical certainty of our language. We are looking for it too confusedly for the signs of reconciliation to appear yet.

Homelessness is no longer just an idea but a collective reality of people who are being hounded by nations. The repressed idea of nations still harbours religious and linguistic differences, often bordering on racism. In the face of this renewed danger to the lives of people dispossessed by history, no science and technology can save us. The rational language of human rights has also provided insufficient arguments. If the consensus that binds secular law is broken, the rational order of things crumbles. This is precisely where Morrison is powerfully apt, when she reminds and cautions the world – “if political agenda is the xenophobic protection of a few of our families against the catastrophic others; if secular language bridles in fear of the sacred; if the future of knowledge is not wisdom but “upgrade”, where might we look for humanity’s future?”

Morrison witnessed enough history to raise this question. The ties with the sacred are not ties with religion but what is prior to religion. The ties with the other are not ties that come after our ties with family and nation but the ties before family and nation. Those ties need to be re-memorised. The present has to be interrupted by an ethical force that breaks the logic of our language. There is a language beneath that of law and order that cannot be overcome by another language of law and order. There is a language beating in the heart of people facing territories of power. We must hear and speak of that language.

Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee is the author of Looking for the Nation: Towards Another Idea of India, published by Speaking Tiger Books (August 2018).

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