The book tells the tale of Nel and Sula's relationship and rivalry. Sula's narrative encapsulates African Americans' experiences in the country during the first part of the 20th century. (Stein 46). Black people in the United States experience extreme poverty, terror, and despair. After the Civil War, black people are freed from racism, but they are not freed from other kinds of slavery, servitude, or societal oppression. Because black people lack legal representation and power, the white society took advantage of the black people and did so with impunity. The black community hoped that they would gain some independence, advantages and recognition in form of respect and economic empowerment after taking part in the first world war but the government of the day turned its back on the plight of the black community and further denied them legal and political protection in spite of loyally serving the US government during the war (Lounsberry, et al… 84). This paper looks into the real life happenings that took place in the life of the author, African America lives in the time that the book is set and still do in modern times.
The author shows this thanklessness of the United States government in the book using the character Shadrack, a strong black man who fights in Europe and returns a broken man. The novel shed spotlight into the economic history of the black community where in the 1930s black community gained some level of legal rights as a result of starting their own businesses and gaining economic power. The book ends in 1965 when more black people become more economically empowered and become prosperous but still face discrimination. The African Americans regain more power and wealth but still face discrimination as they are pushed to live in segregated poorer communities far from white people (Novak, 187).
Races and racism
The book focuses on the sufferings of black people in America at a time when social segregation was at its peak in the North American nation which has a record of having the most notorious history of oppressing and persecuting black people. The characters in the novel face the weight of history in which black people are swindled out of their property and their rights by manipulating laws, language and social norms (Stein 28).
The book is set in the city of medallion where black people are confined to the bottom, the least desirable neighborhood of the city (Lounsberry, Barbara & Grace P40, 2014). White people promised black people the ‘bottom’ land near the river Ohio upon giving away their land on the ‘bottom’ sides of the hills. More of this manipulation of the African American community goes on as the novel progresses with further denial of the black people at the ‘bottom’ of healthcare and heating with excuse of contracting a ghost public works project that does not exist. The white community uses trickery to manipulate their black counterparts on the pretext that they do not have a legal representation and therefore cannot argue their position anywhere, a move meant to keep black people as poor and segregated from white people as possible (Vickroy 13). This new river road project being a ghost project also represents the manipulation of black people as they are kept naïve and optimistic as they chase goals that they will never achieve.
Many black people living in the bottom look at white culture with hateful attitude. White people have shaped the neighborhood to make their nature and culture the highest standard of beauty and behavior. Black people in the novel therefore have no concrete standards of beauty and behavior and try to ape white people’s sophistication (Novak 2014). They are desperately trying to join the white community, a goal that they will never achieve. They try to straighten their hair and painfully twist their noses in desperate attempts to look like white people and succeed in a community and economy tightly under white people’s complete hegemony. Some black people in the bottom succeed to gain enough money and influence to move into white neighborhoods of Medallion (Nissen, Axel & Toni Morrison P.37, 2015). When this is done, white people move away to segregate the city implying that any black peoples’ goal in unattainable, naïve and unreachable as symbolized by the new river road project.
The understanding of the role of races and racism in the novel ‘Sula’ is crucial. Almost all the characters in the novel are black people who are programmed to believe that they are second class citizens and should hate their lot in life and hate each other for being black people. The author, an African American, mirrors her life in a time when the black community was striving to improve in the 20th century when the society was constructed to make this achievement unattainable (Lounsberry, Barbara & Grace P.26, 2014. This makes the novel relevant to all readers in all races.
Love and sexuality
This is one of the hardest things to understand in the novel as some characters in the novel do things that appear cruel at face value but claim they are doing them out of love. A number of the characters in the novel are driven by ‘love’ to even kill and hurt each other. Eva Peace’s act of loving murder to kill her youngest son Ralph ‘Plum’ peace after he returns from the first world war with drug addiction and douses him in kerosene and sets him of fire confident that she’s trying to save him of the miseries of war trauma and drug addiction (Nissen, et al… P.18). Eva cannot also conceive the idea of her son living without her help at the grownup age. She instead ‘takes care’ of him by ending his life. The author does not fully justify the character’s actions and link them to love, portraying love and a very complicated phenomenon that can only be understood by understanding the sexuality of the character (Ogunyemi & Chikwenye P.28, 2015).
Two main protagonists in the novel, Nel Wright and Sula Peace have different understanding of love and sexuality. Sula believe sex is not tied to love in any way and treats it casually in her life. She travels all around America trying to find someone to love and in the processes engages in sexual affairs with different men. Nel on the other hand was brought up to believe that sex is tied to love and is a sacred thing set aside for marriage. Sula loves Nel so much that she often defends her from bullies, cheers her up when she’s sad and celebrated her wedding. But due to their different understanding of love and sexuality, Sula ends up having a asexual affair with Nel’s husband, a fact that hurts Nel so much. Sula also hurts the person she loves most; Nel.
In real life, as in the novel, love is a difficult thing to define. This is because love is hard to understand and also because different people are brought up in different communities and beliefs. The two characters are brought up in a hyper sexualized community which shapes their respective understanding of love. In the process, one type of love clashes with another type. One character uses love to forge sex while the other uses sex to forge love. The two female characters from the bottom narrow the word love to just sex with a man (Vickroy P.29, 2013). The two live in a community in which love seems complex, strange and indecipherable as they try to find love through sexuality and end up giving up the purest form of love’ that is, love for each other.
Identity formation is one of the advantages that give the bottom people a strong sense of community (Novak 2014). They accept that they are miserable, but are so together. They unite in acceptance of the pain. Sula arrives in the bottom with clearly trying to be different and not ready to accept the tragedy of her own life. The whole bottom community hates her together in this, fact that lessens their self-hatred for each other. The strength of the bottom community is depicted here.th strength of the bottom community is also their weakness. They accept that they are doomed to be persecuted but make no effort of bettering their lives. They instead struggle to just make their lives at the bottom bearable. The author argues in favor of this idea and then shows why the ides is wrong. She uses the town people’s miserable process of identity formation is meant to make their lives more bearable but also goes ahead to condemn them for furthering their misery.
Suffering and community identity
The novel tries to show how people in the bottom try to make sense of their tragic lives despite being poor, having been sick with no meaningful healthcare attention and having lost their loved ones prematurely. This they do by forging an identity for themselves and for their community.
The townspeople’s identity is based on their tragic forms of life. The bottom town itself is coined from the cynical swindling of African Americans. In 1917, many black men were sent off to go and fight in the First World War, a job that was very dangerous that men these men end up dying oversees and abroad trying to defend their country. Despite this effort of black men, no new rights and respect for black people is brought up in any public and lawful gatherings. The characters in the novel feel a sense of profound selflessness since no matter how hard they try, they don’t get recognized but paid with ridicule and treated as inferior and forced to live miserably in poverty.
The bottom people are surrounded by misery and accept pessimistic outlook on life. They regard their lives as painful and cannot imagine living a different life. By this acknowledgement, they create a sense of peace and security by accepting things the way they were even if it appears impossible to make them light. They create songs, dances and humor out of their tragic lives to make their pains feel lighter (Stein, 46). The annual ritual that Shadrack- First World War veteran, began is an example of this and named it National Suicide Day. By this they accepted their pains, fear, depression and self-hatred and this makes their lives easier to live.
Women, motherhood and gender roles
Men in the novel cannot be pinned down for long and this forms the basis for centering the book on women and their issues. Their quest for independence and equality together with their jobs keep them away from home and as a result the author concentrates the book on the lives of women and their role in this community at these times when change was highly needed and fought for (Lounsberry, et al... P.36).
One of the main definitions of women in the novel is motherhood. The book does not explicitly link men with their families and wives (Ogunyemi & Chikwenye 49). Mothers in the novel leave their families for long periods of time like in the case of Eva Peace and emerge as the most devoted mother in the whole book. The returns home to take care of their children and when they return from the leave they don’t leave their children again. This strong link in the book between mothers and their children is built on the presence of women in the lives of their children, especially in the case of mothers and daughters which emerges to be exceptionally strong.
Friendship is another bond that makes motherhood one of the main themes in this time and even in modern times and is depicted to be one of the most important type of feminine bond. The most viable example is shown in the case of Sula Peace and NeL Wright. There is also a problem in friendship between ladies. The women in the book are brought up to have in their minds that they must find husbands and anyone who doesn’t is depicted as incomplete. This is depicted in the case where these two big friends Sula and Nel end up ending their friendship in efforts to secure love that appears to be in men. Nel and Sula at only twelve years old also leave their homes to go out and look for ‘beautiful boys’ (Johnson 36). Women in the book just like in real life are tuned to believe that their prime purpose in life is finding husbands and any kind of relationship other than between a man and a woman is considered secondary. This results in a situation in which relationships between females are endangered owing to competition for ‘beautiful boys’ and men.
The relationship between women is defined by one thing: husband. In the book the author assert that the relationship between women and their families and the people around them is the bond that holds the community together. This is a fact that has been witnessed in modern neighborhoods (Ogunyemi & Chikwenye 40). Women in modern times should take lessons from the book that the competition for men, husbands and making new lives should not be the reason to spoil their relationships as the benefit if this goes beyond their own lives and serves to hold the community together.
Names, Signs and interpretations
Names and signs in the novel appear to carry with them huge power. The power in names and signs can be used and abused. The names in the novel are used to depict the characters of the author. Characters are given the opportunity to name of the most ambiguous signs which happens to be Sula Peace’s birthmark. Every character names the mark differently and some names reflect the inner thoughts and behaviors. Others think that the birthmark takes the shape of a snake as in the case of Jude Greene; this represents his sexual desires towards Sula. Shadrack on the other hand thinks the mark is in the shape of a tad pole; a fact that is a symbol for his fishing and infantile mind. Names just like in modern times are not just done out of ignorance but show something about the one that does the naming.
Names in the novel do not only represent the thoughts and desires of the novelist but also asserts something about the person or thing being named. Eva Peace is given the task of naming almost every child born on the bottom and in the processes names several children ‘Dawey’. As the children and grow together, they realize that the name represents togetherness and they end up spending the rest of their lives bound together (Johnson, 25).
The power in names in the novel can be abused, twisted and manipulated to selfish gains. The racist white farmer who promised black workers into accepting to live in the land in the ‘Bottom’ uses this to his own advantage and to the disadvantage of the blacks. The farmers promise the black people one thing and offer them a different thing with the adjective ‘bottom’ used ambiguously to mean that the African Americans belong to the bottom side of life. Naming as a result of this in the novel appear difficult and often linked to deception since each one differently interprets what a name or sign means and they use it for their selfish gains. This is also observable in real life where Pseudonyms are made up for deceptions and selfish gains.
The book is a tragedy of signs with ambiguous definitions and meanings that cannot be agreed upon by everyone. Shadrack uses the word ‘always’ to Sula when she runs into his shack and this she thinks means that he has been watching her always and knows her crime of killing Chicken Little while in real sense he does not even know that Little was downed by Sula. This misinterpretation of words and meanings scarred Sula for the better part of her life. Among the words that have been misinterpreted in the novel are always, love and friendship.
Conclusion
The author Toni Morrison naming been born in Ohio where the book was set and faced great threats that arose from racism, fled the south to escape racism and economic oppression as symbolized by the movement of people from Bottom to Medallion. She went to Howard University, symbolizing the struggle of African Americans to gain new identities. She proceeds to graduate with masters at Cornell (Vickroy 40). This also stands for the quest of black people to attain perfection. She got married, just like any other African American female in the novel and gave birth to two children and forms a new life as in the lives of different characters in the novel. She later divorces her architect husband as depicted in the novel where she excludes men in the cohesion and development of the society. The author uses her novels to champion for equality and goes ahead to earn Nobel peace prize and teaches in many colleges and universities. It is no doubt that the author uses the novel to mirror her life story and the plight of the African American community in the USA.
Works cited
Johnson, Barbara. "’Aesthetic’and ‘rapport’in Toni Morrison's Sula." Textual Practice 7.2 (2013): 165-172.
Lounsberry, Barbara, and Grace Ann Hovet. "Principles of Perception in Toni Morrison's Sula." Black American Literature Forum. School of Education, Indiana State University, 2014).
Nissen, Axel, and Toni Morrison. "Form Matters: Toni Morrison's" Sula" and the Ethics of Narrative." Contemporary Literature 40.2 (2015): 263-285.
Novak, Phillip. "" Circles and Circles of Sorrow": In the Wake of Morrison's Sula." Publications of the Modern Language Association of America (2014): 184-193.
Ogunyemi, Chikwenye Okonjo. "Sula:" A Nigger Joke"." Black American Literature Forum. School of Education, Indiana State University, 2015.
Stein, Karen F. "Toni Morrison's Sula: A Black Woman's Epic." Black American Literature Forum. School of Education, Indiana State University, 2016.
Vickroy, Laurie. "The Force outside/the force inside: mother-love and regenerative spaces in Sula and Beloved." Obsidian II 8.2 (2013): 28-46.
