The shadow of the heart of darkness

Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Toni Morrison

In 1990, Toni Morrison was invited to deliver the William Massey Lectures in the History of American Civilization at Harvard University. This book collects her three lectures in essay form.

The thesis of these lectures is that the fact of slavery and racism in the U.S. has had a significant impact on American literature, quite independent of whether or not a specific work is “about” issues of race or contains characters who are black. Morrison argues that what she terms “the Africanist presence” can be seen throughout the American literary canon – primarily consisting of works written by white (male) authors, for an audience assumed to be white (and predominantly male). By examining the works of writers as diverse as Willa Cather, Edgar Allen Poe and Ernest Hemingway, Morrison looks at how blackness – whether of a specific character or the sense of an ever-present and pervasive ground against which the action of white characters can be placed – has been used by American authors to create their sense of being white, and of how the consciousness of slavery has been used to create the themes of individualism and liberty that are si much a part of American literature.

I must confess that I have not read a lot of American “canon” literature, my tastes having tended to based themselves more firmly in the traditions of British and Commonwealth literature. So I am ill-prepared to comment critically on the validity of Morrison’s argument. Nonetheless, the argument is interesting, and seems to point to new perspectives on the American “canon” novels I am familiar with.

Furthermore, something that has struck me since reading these essays is how Morrison’s argument can in some ways be adapted to a consideration of the influence of Aboriginal peoples on the development of Canadian literature. (Canadian literary critics have already gotten well into the ways in which the existence of two separate linguistic and cultural colonising peoples, and the looming historical event of the conquest of Quebec, has influenced our literature in both languages.)

I’m not as well-versed in French-Canadian literature as I would like to be, but English-Canadian literature often seems to take as one of its themes survival - of the body, of the functioning structure of the mind, and of the broader functioning of society: life against death, sanity against madness, civilisation against chaos. Many have argued that this is a response to the significantly more challenging climate, but perhaps it can also be seen as a struggle for the white colonising settler cultures to justify their conquest by positioning life (among settler peoples) in Canada as a struggle to create order and civil society from savagery and chaos - which, in order to do, we (as settler peoples) must first define the Aboriginal peoples as unordered and uncivil - and by defining ourselves (the settler peoples) as civilised against the imagined picture of a people who we need to pretend are not.

Morrison’s criticism has certainly given me some interesting things to think about.

The measure of a life

Measure of a Man, Sidney Poitier

I've always deeply admired Sidney Poitier as an actor, and at the same time, I've always been deeply conscious of him as an icon of my youth, one of the ground-breaking black men and women who started pushing - or perhaps were allowed to push, because the times needed something that gave the appearance of movement - the boundaries of what black people were seen to do and have and be. I know what the public parts of Poitier's life have meant to me - so it was interesting to me to read what the man himself is willing to share about what he thinks about his life.

The Measure of a Man isn't a straight-forward autobiography - rather, it is organised about a series of themes, from the influence of poverty and race to the importance of learning and hard work, as Poitier traces his experience and belief about each through his life, before turning to another.

This woven narrative, however, makes very clear the events and circumstances of his life - the growing up in poverty in the Bahamas, moving to Miami and then New York as a very young man, starting a family and a career, reaching the heights of that career, in ways that no one of his race, and few of any race, have managed, growing older and accepting the slow decline of all things. It also makes clear the philosophies that the man have evolved over the years, and chosen to live by.

I can't say I agree with all of his beliefs - there are places where he appears to have made a fetish about the value of poverty in teaching children how to really enjoy the real things in life, and there are ways in which his attitudes toward women remain much influenced by the patriarchal and sexist traditions of his youth and his native culture.

But I'm glad to know more - both what is admirable to me and what is not - about someone who will always be an icon to me.

Michelle Sagara: the Cast series

Michelle West, writing as Michelle Sagara, has another interesting series going full blast: the Chronicles of elantra, perhaps better known as the Cast series.

At this point, I've read the first two books in the series, Cast in Shadow and Cast in Courtlight, and I am enjoying them, although not quite as much as West's other work - but I'll get into that a little later.

Fantasy doesn't often pay attention to the function of policing, being generally more interested in the doings of princes, heroes, wizards and occasional thieves, assassins and other folks from the underside who have great destinies ahead of them, for whom the local police are just another obstacle to get around. In this series, West has made her protagonist - Kaylin, a young women with a mysterious and traumatic past - a cop. She and her colleagues police the streets of the capital city of Elantra, where humans and a number of assorted other races dwell in uneasy proximity, surrounded by a band of lawless territories known as the Nightshade.

Kaylin was born in the Nightshade, where as a child she was caught up in a macabre series of ritual murders of children. she's grown now, and happy with her life - until the murders begin again and shadowy characters from her past come into her life once more.

There's a lot that I like to this series - the character and development of kaylin, the highly complex and structured society she lives in, which its multiplicity of cultures and people, all with different abilities, psychologies and customs, Kaylin's interactions with many of her colleagues and acquaintances - but this is another series published by Luna, and as with Judith Tarr's Luna series (published under the name Caitlin Brennan), there's sense that the romantic elements - which West is quite capable of handing in a way that I appreciate in other books - are just a little too foregrounded and formulaic at the same time. There's a little too much of the stereotype in some of the dark and mysterious men out of Kaylin's past, too much of the "is he evil, or just misunderstood" in their characters, too much of the annoyingly eternal triangle in their interactions with Kaylin.

That said, I'm reading 'til the end, because Kaylin herself is just too interesting to resist. Plus, she has a mentor who's a dragon, and I'm just a real sucker for that.

Classic feminist fantasies

Daughter of the Bright Moon, Lynn Abbey

I have long had fond memories of Abbey's two books about Rifkind, priestess and warrior, sole survivor of her tribe, a wanderer in strange lands. And now that Abbey has written a third book about Rifkind's adventures (Rifkind's Challenge,, it only seemed right to hunt down copies of the original books and re-read them before picking up the new one.

Re-reading this was a pleasure, and it brought back those pre-Xena, pre-kickass urban fantasy chick days when it wasn't all that easy to find a good story about a strong woman who takes on the worst evil you can find and survives. Plus, it's a good story, with some nice characterisation and some real humour in and among the swords and the magic.

Marie Brennan: Warrior and Witch

I'm really starting to like Marie Brennan's work. After throughly enjoying her Elizabethan Faerie fantasy Midnight Never Come, I decided to follow up with her two previously published novels, Warrior and Witch (also published as Doppelganger amd Warrior and Witch).

Loved them. Absolutely loved them.

In addition to writing some strong and realistic female characters with important quests and real emotions and human complexities and frailties such that, for the longest time, you're really torn because you like both protagonists and it seems that there's no way that both can have what they want, Brennan has done several things in these books that I really like. First, she's created a unique magical system that has enough in common with the standards that it makes sense, while being fresh in some very interesting ways and not needlessly over-complicated.

Second, she's given us the story of a quasi-religious order that is torn apart by a heart-rending discovery about the misinterpretation of a crucial element of dogma and the deep and painful inner struggle to accept what was wrong about their teaching and practice, forgive themselves and change it. This is the kind of story that I love, about belief and repentance and redemption and things that matter to the mind and soul, and how far people are willing to go for what they believe.

Third, she's positioned all of this in a multi-faceted society that works because it's not all about the mages, or all about the warriors, or all about the priests, but rather about how all of them work together to make life work.

Reading these made me very happy, and long for more.