The Origin of Others

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2016

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Foreword-Chapter 3

Chapters 4-6

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Chapters 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 4 Summary: “Configurations of Blackness”

In Chapter 4, Morrison examines definitions of “black” and “blackness” and how literature uses them in both violent and constructive ways. This examination includes a discussion of the development of Black towns and 20th-century eugenics and lynching, as well as an explanation of the strategies Morrison uses in Paradise to reconfigure Blackness and demonstrate the arbitrariness of race as a construct.

Beginning with a discussion of Black towns, Morrison notes that what the towns’ founders meant by “black” is not always clear. An examination of historical archives reveals that thriving Black towns were predominantly populated by light-skinned Black people and were exclusionary in terms of the skills, abilities, and property they welcomed (56-57). Clarifying the meaning of “blackness” in these Black towns serves the purpose of demonstrating how socially, politically, and medically defined configurations of Blackness affect Black people’s understanding of their racialized identity and sense of self.

The establishment of Black towns became a response to the racial terror of the 20th century. Morrison includes the story of Isaac Woodard, who, returning to his home in North Carolina after serving in World War II, was horrifically brutalized by policemen in South Carolina. She also lists the names and details of several Black people who were lynched in the 20th century. These examples illustrate that intra-racial color coding among Black people, the fear of being rejected by one’s own people, as well as the possibility of being brutalized and murdered by white people motivated the founders of these Black towns.

Morrison’s novel Paradise explores the configuration of Blackness under white supremacy by turning it on its head. Like in real life, the threat of the outside world is the motivation for the fictional Black town, but rather than proximity to whiteness, the townspeople are concerned with and desire to maintain Black racial purity. Morrison’s goal is to signal the instability and meaninglessness of race as a construct (66). To achieve this goal, Morrison explores a Black town in which religious difference and violence caused by uneven power distribution are defining features.

Morrison concludes with a personal recollection of an experience at Vienna Biennale, in which a piece of artwork involved standing hand-to-hand with different women through a mirror. This piece of memoir underscores a point that Morrison hopes to make with Paradise and her examination of Othering: the role that one-to-one encounters can play in escaping the harm of Othering.

Chapter 5 Summary: “Narrating the Other”

Morrison discusses how narrative fiction provides an opportunity to become the Other with “sympathy, clarity, and the risk of self-examination” (91). Chapter 5 is primarily an explanation of the narrative choices she makes in her novel Beloved, in which the dead child is the ultimate Other.

Morrison begins by discussing how her role as Senior Editor at Random House prompted The Black Book project. Among the material collected for The Black Book was a newspaper article about Margaret Garner, the woman whose story inspired Beloved. Morrison notes that she was intrigued by two observations in the newspaper article: one, Garner’s mother-in-law’s inability to condemn or approve of the infanticide; and two, Garner’s serenity after the infanticide (81).

She goes on to contrast factual accounts of the Garner story with her fictional rendering. Stephen Weisenburger’s Modern Medea: A Family Story of Slavery and Child-Murder from the Old South is a biographical retelling of the Garner story in which Garner kills her children as an act of vengeance against an unfaithful husband (82). Morrison also notes historical documents recounting the trial and its outcome.

Morrison explains, however, that her concern was less with the facts and more with making imaginative narrative choices that would “fathom the mother-in-law’s inability to condemn her daughter-in-law for murder” and in which “the speaking, thinking dead child whose impact—and appearance and disappearance—could operate as slavery’s gothic damage” (82, 83). To explain her narrative choices, she includes a passage from the novel in which Baby Suggs, the mother-in-law, delivers a sermon demonstrating her commitment to faith and love in the face of slavery (84-85). Morrison also explains how she enhanced the life of the living child to explore her endurance in the face of the circumstances.

Finally, she includes a passage from the novel that demonstrates the character Beloved as the ultimate Other. In this passage, the repetition of the phrase, “It was not a story to pass on” and the emphasis on forgetting Beloved and her story drive Morrison’s point about the experiences of the Other (89), who haunts those who have Othered her, forever demanding to belong.

Chapter 6 Summary: “The Foreigner’s Home”

In Chapter 6, Morrison discusses how globalization and the mass movement of people, both voluntary and involuntary, contributes to the process of Othering because of its perceived threat to one’s sense of belonging. This discussion contrasts how white American literature has figured Africa and its people with the novel The Radiance of Children, in which author Camara Laye turns those configurations on their head by positioning the white European protagonist as the Other.

Morrison begins by talking about perceptions of globalization and how mass movement draws attention to borders as porous and vulnerable. She writes that globalization, narrowly defined, “means the free movement of capital and the rapid distribution of data and products operating within a politically neutral environment shaped by multinational corporate dimensions” (96). However, she goes on to note its larger connotations and broader implications, which include the attendant fear of premature cultural death, thereby prompting an attempt to reinforce borders and exclusionary definitions of belonging and foreignness.

She then turns to literary examples to comment on the banality of foreignness. She notes that African and African American writers have a long history of confronting such dilemmas, as exile and foreignness in their homelands and the places where they belong has marked their experiences. She recalls a memory from childhood to illustrate this experience of foreignness—namely, her complicated relationship to Africa, “[a] huge needy homeland to which we were said to belong but which none of us had seen or cared to see” (100-01).

She goes on to discuss literature from the 20th century that mythologized Africa as a dark continent in need of light, such as that of Joyce Carey, Elspeth Huxley, and H. Rider Haggard. She notes that Western novels published throughout the 1950s (such as those by Joseph Conrad, Isak Dinesen, Saul Bellow, and Ernest Hemingway) used literary tropes that depicted Africa as “an inexhaustible playground for tourists and foreigners” (102). These white tourists achieved self-enlightenment via narratives that “offer[ed] the occasion for knowledge but [kept] [Africa’s] unknowableness intact” (103).

Finally, she turns to Camara Laye’s 1950s novel, The Radiance of Children. After providing a brief synopsis of Laye’s plot, Morrison discusses how Laye parodies the parallel sensibilities of Europe and Africa and employs perceptions of foreignness—namely menace, depravity, and incomprehensibility—to allow readers “to see the de-racing of a Westerner’s experience of Africa without European support, protection, or command” (110). Turning the white European protagonist into the Other illustrates the ways that people cling to their own sense of belonging while denying that of others. For Morrison, this clinging is in effect an attempt to deny the foreignness within ourselves. It is the openness, however—the “crumbling of cultural armor maintained out of fear” (110)—that offers some salvation and authentic belonging.

Chapters 4-6 Analysis

In Chapters 4 through 6, Morrison’s discussion shifts to the impact of Othering on those who have been Othered. Through her analysis of the literature and consideration of social, political, and economic forces at play in the process of Othering, she highlights the subjectivity of the Other and intracommunal violence within Othered communities, as well as the experience of exile, homelessness, and movement prevalent among Others. The impact and absurdity of Othering are illuminated through an inversion of the Othering process.

In Chapter 4, Morrison poses the question, “Once blackness is accepted as socially, politically, and medically defined, how does that definition affect black people?” (58). With this question, she draws attention to the subjectivity of the Other. She explores this subjectivity most notably in her novel Beloved, which she discusses extensively in Chapter 5. By bringing the dead child, the ultimate Other, to life in the novel, Morrison suggests that despite objectification, the Other remains a living, feeling, thinking human being who has a social and psychological need for acceptance and survival. The inclusion of the ending passage demonstrates this need does not go away simply because one has been excluded (87-90); rather, the exclusion and denial intensify it. One of the most illuminating pieces of Morrison’s passage regarding the impact of Othering on the Other is:

Although she has claim, she is not claimed. In the place where long grass opens, the girl who waited to be loved and cry shame erupts into her separate parts, to make it easy for the chewing laughter to swallow her all away (88).

This piece reveals the Other’s subjectivity and objectification with “although she has claim, she is not claimed”; it highlights the longing to belong and be seen as a whole person with a subjective sense of self with “waited to be loved and cry shame”; and it illuminates the further separation of the self with “erupts into her separate parts.” This eruption into separate parts, i.e., not being whole, is one of the impacts of Othering that Morrison highlights in Chapters 1-3 with respect to those who benefit from Othering, but this separation also takes place within the Othered group. It manifests as intracommunal violence and exclusion. In other words, Othering and the violence of Othering begets more Othering and more violence.

Morrison discusses this intracommunal violence and exclusion most extensively in Chapter 4 when she considers Black towns. Regarding the advertisements for these towns that directed migrants to “Come prepared or not at all” (56), Morrison writes:

That seemed to be sage advice: bring your own tools, horses, clothing, money, and skills so you will not be a burden and can make your own way. Yet it was exclusionary—an elderly widow with no skills but housekeeping? a mother with small children and no husband? a physically disabled old man? Such people would have been warned away to ensure the health and growth of the town. Also, it seemed to me, mixed-race pioneers were preferable. I gathered that from looking at photographs showing one or two dark-skinned men assigned to guard duty. Thriving black towns were apparently peopled by the light-skinned—meaning they had ‘white’ blood in their veins (56-57).

The Other’s subjectivity in the face of their Othering, coupled with the social and psychological need for acceptance and survival, inspires choices and activity “both violent and constructive” to ensure that acceptance and survival. As Morrison goes on to discuss, the exclusionary and color-coding practices of the Black towns did not exist simply for the sake of themselves but rather were a direct consequence of the racialized Othering and the threat of racialized violence that characterize American society.

Intracommunal violence as a direct consequence of racialized Othering also surfaces in the story of Garner and the infanticide. In Chapter 5, Morrison includes a passage from the newspaper article where she first learned about Garner while compiling material for The Black Book (76). In the article where Reverend P. S. Basset recounts his encounter with Garner, he says:

She said, that when the officers and slave-hunters came to the house in which they were concealed, she caught a shovel and struck two of her children on the head, and then took the knife and cut the throat of the third, and tried to kill the other—that if they had given her time, she would have killed them all—that with regard to herself, she cared but little; but she was unwilling to have her children suffer as she had done (77-78).

The newspaper article goes on to say that Garner “would much rather kill them at once and thus end their sufferings than have them taken back to slavery and be murdered by piece-meal” (78). In the face of Othering, Black people have had to make choices that may appear unfathomable or insensibly cruel to one who hasn’t been Othered. It is only when one explores the subjectivity of the objectified Other (as, for example, Morrison does in Beloved) that one realizes that such intracommunal violence is the result of having been Othered.

Another important impact of Othering that Morrison highlights in Chapters 4-6 is the experience of exile, homelessness, and movement. Morrison opens Chapter 6 with thoughts on globalization and mass movement and how they draw attention to the porousness of borders (94). She makes the point that most of the movement comprises those who have been enslaved or colonized and/or those who are war refugees (94)—in other words, “those running from persecution, conflict, and generalized violence” (98). This is a significant point because it draws a connection between racism and the “free movement of capital” (96), which are so intertwined as to be inseparable. Exile, homelessness, and movement has marked the lives of those negatively impacted by the inseparable maneuverings of white supremacy and capitalism.

This movement, forced and voluntary, that white supremacy and capitalism prompt has its origins in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Under chattel slavery, enslaved Africans involuntarily transported across the Middle Passage were the “free movement of capital” (98), as they themselves were literally the wealth being moved transnationally. Different but related movement informs Garner’s story, as “the slave mother, and members of her family had fled Kentucky, where they were enslaved, for the free state of Ohio” (77), as well as in the stories of hundreds of thousands of enslaved people who fled plantations in successful and unsuccessful attempts to escape slavery. It surfaces again in the creation of the Black towns, “harbors of safety and prosperity as far away as possible from white people” (58), to which Black people fled attempting to escape racist violence in 19th- and 20th-century America.

Considering this movement, Morrison calls attention to the way that systemic violence prompts it only for it to prompt more violence through the process of Othering: “[F]rontiers and borders—real, metaphorical, and psychological” must be fortified for the privileged to maintain their power and control in the face of this movement (99). These systemic processes cause Black people to be exiled or homeless wherever they are—even in their place of birth. Thus, it is often the task of those who have been Othered—namely, Black people—to illuminate the impact and absurdity of Othering. As Morrison writes:

African and African American writers are not alone in coming to terms with these problems, but they do have a long and singular history of confronting them. Of not being at home in their homeland; of being exiled in the place where they belong (99-100).

As Morrison shows in Chapters 4 through 6, narrative fiction can facilitate this illumination by inverting the process of Othering, theatricalizing it and offering opportunities for self-reflection. This is precisely her aim with Beloved, where giving the objectified Others a subjective voice offers readers “an opportunity to be and to become the Other. The Stranger. With sympathy, clarity, and the risk of self-examination” (91). It is also her aim with Paradise, where she wishes to show the absurdity and meaninglessness of the race construct and intracommunal Othering through “a deepening of the definition of ‘black’ and a search for its purity as defiance against the eugenics of ‘white’ purity and especially the ‘Come Prepared or Not at All’ rule” (64). In Chapter 4, she explains her narrative choices in Paradise, highlighting that the all-Black town with a purity requirement is riddled with conflict and attempts to escape harm and mitigate failures (64-73).

In Chapter 6, Morrison discusses the work of an African writer who uses the inversion strategy to “launch a discursive negotiation with the West” regarding the narratives of Africa found in Western literature (105). Where these make the continent out to be a mystified, unknowable, foreign place in need of “paternalistic-colonial ‘elders’” (102), Camara Laye’s The Radiance of the King makes its European protagonist, Clarence, the Other in an African country. On Laye’s novel, Morrison remarks:

Unpacking the hobbled idioms of the foreigner usurping one’s home, of de-legitimizing the native, of reversing the claims of belonging, the novel allows us to experience a white man immigrating to Africa, alone, without a job, without resources or even a family name (108).

She goes on to write:

This fictional investigation into the limited perceptions of a culture allows us to see the de-racing of a Westerner’s experience of Africa without European support, protection or command. It allows us to re-discover or imagine anew what it feels like to be marginal, ignored, superfluous, foreign: to have one’s name never uttered; to be stripped of history or representation; to be sold or exploited labor for the benefit of a presiding family, a shrewd entrepreneur, a local regime. In other words, to become a black slave (109).

Thus, Laye’s novel, like Morrison’s Beloved and Paradise, demonstrates the overwhelming impact and harm of Othering by exposing the absurdity of its underlying ideas. After all, as Morrison posits in the final chapter, all human beings are dealing with “an uneasy relationship with our own foreignness, our own rapidly disintegrating sense of belonging” (94-95). The process of Othering is a product of our own fears, as we recognize that we are not so different from the Stranger or Other from whom we wish to differentiate ourselves (a point that Morrison also makes in her analysis from the first three chapters). Morrison concludes that salvation for all of us lies in “openness, this crumbling of cultural armor maintained out of fear” (110).