A gift incomplete: Toni Morrison A Mercy (Chatto and Windus 2008)
Simon Smart
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“Don’t be afraid. My telling can’t hurt you despite what I have done.” |
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I should have known better than to trust the opening line of A Mercy, the first Toni Morrison novel to hit the shelves in around five years. The words come from Florens, a slave girl, given away by her mother when she was 8 years old, and it didn’t take long for this abandoned little colt of a girl, with a love of shoes she could never afford, to get under my skin.
The Nobel Prize-winning author of such disturbing and beautiful novels as Beloved and Paradise offers supremely crafted and hauntingly evocative tales but I approach them in the way I might anticipate deep tissue massage—plenty of pain and discomfort to go with obvious gain. Her readers have to be prepared to feel chastened—perhaps even heartbroken.
Morrison typically soaks her audience in American
history—digging at the scabs of the nation’s bloody past of hard-won,
costly triumphs and bitter memories. Morrison is fiercely determined to
explore and expose the African-American story. But like all the best
storytellers there is a universal quality to her work that goes beyond
time and place. In this sense, A Mercy, is no different.
Morrison says she wanted to take race out of slavery and so set her
story in 1690, before the shameful scourge really got going. “There is
no civilisation that doesn’t rest on some form of slavery,” she says
and A Mercy shows how any of us can become slaves to people or things.
The story focuses on a disparate group of women and
men—thrown together by bizarre fate and traumatic circumstance—hewing
out an existence in the North-eastern wilderness of the late 17th
century, seeking and finding a family of sorts. Anglo Dutch
farmer/trader Jacob Vaark has purchased a wife, Rebekka, who arrives in
the new world via ship’s passage, the experience of which would make
even the most dire of destinations look like the Eden he hopes to
create. Native American Lina, servant to the Vaarks, has made a narrow
escape from a village decimated by small pox. Enigmatic loner,
‘Sorrow’, brought up on a ship, never quite manages to find her ‘land’
legs. Indentured labourers Scully and Willard are an ironic
counterpoint to ‘the Smithy’—a black man who is free.
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But it is Florens, the slave girl purchased by Vaark for a bad debt, despite his revulsion at trading in flesh, who is the primary character, and the one to whom readers are immediately drawn. The vulnerable little girl forms the centre of the narrative that traces her movement towards womanhood.
These characters represent the new country being forged out of violence, brutality, disease, hardship, and slavery of various kinds, all the while infused with and driven by dreams of a better future, the promise of the good life, the romance of the frontier dream of prosperity. There is beauty and wonder in this landscape, but it comes at a cost that for some is too high to pay.
Morrison evokes this landscape with such skill and
dexterity that the reader feels truly immersed in the sounds, smells
and touch of a distant era. Layers of meaning and emotional complexity
emerge out of the distinct perspectives of each character – with
Morrison masterfully shifting from first person (Florens) to third
(everyone else)—filling gaps in the narrative like a complex puzzle
falling into place. The world looks very different to different people,
and much is to be gained from an omniscient narrator who can place us
in the shoes of another, an aid to empathy we otherwise lack.
Those familiar with Morrison will know that she is
peerless in writing about human suffering with piercing, devastating
elegance. Her stories are frequently embedded in the experience of
black Americans and their encounter with fear, mistrust and hatred. On
a perilous solo journey, Florens encounters a village of protestant
pioneers driven to paranoia about demons and witches. “No hate is
there,” says Florens of the moment when they strip her naked to check
for signs of the ‘darkness’, “but they are looking at … my body across
distances without recognition. Swine look at me with more connection
when they raise their heads from the trough.” Here is a moment of
unravelling and disintegration for the innocent and naïve Florens.
“Inside I am shrinking,” she says. “I am losing something with every
step I take. I can feel the thing drain. Something precious is leaving
me. I am a thing apart.”
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Never far from Morrison's literary world are ultimate 'theological' questions
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Never far from Morrison’s literary world are ultimate ‘theological questions’—what it means to be human, where hope might come from, where is God in the midst of such sorrow and loss. The sadness in this story is most evident in a mother who longs to explain to her 8-year-old daughter why she gave her away; and the ache of the daughter not knowing.
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