LITR 5731:
Seminar in American Multicultural Literature: Minority
Sample
Student Research Project
Fernando Trevino
12-04-07
Reconciliation of the Past: Song of Solomon and Bless Me, Ultima
Minority groups have a harder time than immigrants assimilating into the dominant culture in America, partly due to language differences, but more importantly because of the inability to reconcile with past events that continue to impede on their progress in the present. For immigrants, the past can be reconciled by first making the move to America and secondly possessing a desire to assimilate. The physical distance between America and their homelands can provide a psychological relief that may embolden immigrants to particulate wholeheartedly in American life, raise their resolve to face cultural differences and challenges head on, and feel less guilty in adopting one culture over the one they previously observed. For minority groups, participation in the dominant culture in American is much harder to do, since the close proximity of past events, particularly traumatic events, is not easily dismissible and continues to be a debilitating aspect of their lives.
For African Americans and Native Americans the past represents a chain of events where one group superseded their authority over another group by forces or deception with impunity. The residual effects has robbing the two groups of their identities and humanity creating a perpetual state of limbo, which in some ways, is further complicated by the conflicting prospect of joining the dominant culture or resist. For Mexican-Americans, the conflict is not as destructive though there does exist levels of ambiguity that produces a state of limbo as well.
This essay will focus on the residual effects of the past on the characters in Song of Solomon and Bless Me, Ultima. Each novel involves “a protagonist’s quest for a hidden truth that destabilizes their everyday world and turns out to involve coming to terms with some significant, sometimes previously obscure, aspect of the past and its operative influence on the present” (Rothberg, 501). Despite the main characters having the same goal, both novels examine the characters’ reconciliation of the past differently.
In Song of Solomon, the traumatic events of slavery has left the main characters paranoid and trying to find comforting qualities of their past and bring them to the present. For Bless Me, Ultima, the past is given less prominence, as all of the characters and the novel as a whole tends to suppress its Indian heritage by not making it an issue. In other words, Song of Solomon seeks to investigate some aspect of the origins to their present troubles by looking to the past while Bless Me Ultima does not. For Bless Me, Ultima, incorporating or delving in the past could very well have relieved some of the identity conflicts Antonio was experiencing.
The two opposite perspectives cited are facilitated in each novel someway by the characters’ relationships with their parents. The parents in both novels have a psychologically suffocating influence on their children, constraining their ability to attain self-actualization and break the cycle of despondence that continues to prevail in their minority group.
The residual effect of slavery has produced in the characters of Song of Solomon contemptuous feelings and paranoia towards others which perpetuates their troubles. Their dysfunctional dispositions provide for the novel two distinct ways of thinking about the impact of the past on the present. For one, characters attempt to locate the sources of power and violence present in their daily lives by creating a system of binary oppositions which to function by. Binary oppositions include past and present, victim and victimizer. Guitar, for example, functions under this system as he sees his father as a victim and his father’s white employers as victimizers. Emmitt Till’s murder and the Birmingham Church bombing are other examples that leave a character like Guitar so preoccupied with the present that he fails to truly investigate the central cause of his destructive impulses which has its roots in the past. Certainly the devastating influence of slavery is palpable since Guitar’s system is flawed, resulting in further loss of his humanity and being no closer to reconciliation or solace.
The second way of thinking about the impact of the past is to seek the origins or events that would account for the suffering of the present. However, the consequences of such attempts still create negative outcomes in some form or another. An example of this includes Milkman’s departure from Not Doctor Street to find out about his past. On his quest, Milkman “not only discovers his family origins, he experiences a unity with the land, respect for his family and fellow human beings, and a visceral sense of his African origins” (Pocock, 287) resulting in the attainment of self-actualization; however his absence contributes to the destruction of Hagar.
The power of origins, especially ones fermented by traumatic events as depicted in the novel has resulted in a dysfunctional perspective that when one tries to rectify the past with some action in the present, the results are actually enablers of the destructive cycle they live in. At least for Milkman, his dysfunctional perspective was recalibrated to something that enabled him to reconcile his past with his present. For Guitar, as explained before, no such luck. Macon consumes himself with the outward symbols of wealth and elegance, buying the finest cars while the rest of the African-American community in his city suffers dire poverty. He tells Milkman, “Own things. And let the things you own other things. Then you’ll own yourself and other people too.” (55) Macon is not a bad man as he tells his son at one point, just the effects of slavery has shape in him a personality that vehemently requires ownership of things or people, similar to that of a slave owner. This personality is examined further as a system of relations he has helped create in his family, and of the dynamics of his family of origin.
Lincoln’s Heaven represents a psychological anchor for Macon, as a place of cooperation and triumph; a place he dutifully and with aggressive actions tries to replicate in the present, a place “that was to have been his” (52) because it symbolizes self-actualization in a racist society. While reminiscing with Milkman about the farm, Macon seems to undergo a psychological transformation as he speaks: “His voice sounded different to Milkman. Less hard, and his speech was different. More southern and comfortable and soft” (52). It was, says Macon, “nice” (53). In the process of reconciling the past and the present in this fashion, he corrupts Milkman by having him believe his behavior is justifiable.
For Macon Dead and Ruth Foster, their dysfunctional perspectives and their attempts to rectify the past with their actions ultimately has created a portrait of enmeshment, “the suffocating bond parents occasionally create with their children that Morrison calls ‘anaconda love’” (Storhoff, 290). Song of Solomon dramatizes parental enmeshment by contrasting Macon Dead’s and Ruth Foster’s families’ origin to reveal why they are over involved in Milkman’s life. They are attempting to reconstitute patterns of behavior from their childhood into their own family. Milkman provides Ruth a male to serve, and Macon a young man to take his place as Macon works to embody the workings of his father. Milkman, unfortunately is controlled by both his father and mother as serves as a connective agent for the family that suffers Macon’s rage and furthers Ruth’s unsatisfied love. “He has been triangulated into their power struggle, and it is his life’s task to extricate himself” (Storhoff, 300).
Perhaps the conventional way to look at Bless Me, Ultima is as a piece of ethnic literature that has something important to say about being “ethnic” or bicultural in the United States, especially when it is being taught to monocultural students. The narrative of Ultima, in the form of a bildungsroman, is driven in part by the issues of personal identity that seem connected to social identity issues of Mexican-Americans though largely excluding Indian heritage. Social identity issues facing Mexican-Americans include constructing and celebrating a hybrid ethnic identity that is able to cope by developing a tolerance for contradictions or ambiguity. This hybrid ethnic identity should also include the recovery of an indigenous past; however, Anaya’s representation of identity conflict appears to be highly personal – a family matter without larger implications that address their Indian heritage. Bless Me Ultima does the opposite of Song of Solomon as the characters don’t focus or dwell on the origins of their indigenous past as a way to rectify present identity issues.
The main reasons this assertion includes a persistent disconnect or lack of ethnic conflicts in the novel despite an overwhelming and widely believed presence of content that draws deeply on Native American mythology such as the golden carp. Even the Mexican-American construction seems thin since Bless Me Ultima contains no such struggles or displays no overt complications with issues of assimilation and integration versus cultural preservation. There is “no obvious or foregrounded “Anglo” influences trying to Americanize Antonio at the expense of his Mexican roots” (Caminero-Santangelo, 115). Certainly, there is something to be said about examples of Antonio’s early school experience of being tensed for his lunch and not speaking English. He finds solace with children with the same problem and while there is a social and identity issue within such an action, the behavior is not the focus of the novel.
The novel as a whole provides a subtle glimpse into the cultural pressures that caused Mexican Americans to deny their Indian heritage. The Native American heritage issue is suppressed and masked by the father-mother conflict that overwhelms Antonio throughout the book. In Bless Me Ultima, there is a binary opposition that exist in a way similar to one described earlier about Guitar in Song of Solomon, though without the violence impulses. The father-mother conflict, Catholic Church-pagan god, curandera-bruja are examples that function in the book. And similar to the way it functions for Guitar, such conflicts overwhelms Antonio, perpetuating his anxiety, distracting him from rectifying his Indian heritage. Antonio discusses a time when Ultima spoke of “the ancient medicines of other tribes, the Aztecas, Mayas, and even of those in the old, old country, the Moors. But I did not listen, I was thinking of my brothers” (42).
The Catholic Church-pagan God conflict is an extension of the conflict between Antonio’s father and mother. The presence of Ultima in Antonio’s life is to facilitate reconciliation with his present trouble even with inferences to his Indian heritage as one of the lessons that Antonio must learn on the road to maturity is that elements of Catholicism and paganism can be combined to form a new, hybrid religion as Antonio discovers by the end of the book that he can take “God and the golden carp—and making something new” (247). Bless Me Ultima explores the difficulty of reconciling conflicting cultural traditions; however the inclusion of Antonio’s Indian heritage is never any prominence by Antonio as an element worthy of greater investigation or as a solution to his problems.
Another example of his preoccupation is displayed in the nature of his dreams. In his early dreams, for instance, Antonio is largely preoccupied with the question of his destiny, of whether he will become a vaquero or a priest. But in his later dreams, he is preoccupied with much larger questions of family, morality and duty. Never in an overt way, is Antonio’s Indian heritage an issue on his mind. Even the inclusion of the Virgin of Guadalupe chiefly symbolizing forgiveness, understanding, and the resolution of cultural conflict is not explored in greater detail. The story of the dark-skinned Virgin represents the reconciliation of the European Catholic Church with the indigenous culture of Antonio’s homeland, but that is all that is implied.
By the end of the novel, Antonio’s maturation is not complete, which to perhaps leave room for recognizing his indigenous past as he begins to think with interest Indian heritage he is apart of. Antonio comments after hearing the story of the Indians with great awe and appreciation: “And there is also the dark, mystical past, I thought, the past of the people who lived here and left their traces in the magic that crops out today” (229). Antonio is now paying more attention to that particular past that he had neglected before, and now seems to feel less lost in and threatened about his place and time. It is perhaps his immaturity at the beginning of the novel that makes such inquires into that facet of his life harder to extricate and internalize.
Song of Solomon and Bless Me Ultima account for the influences of past events and the impact on the present lives of its characters, however the two novels contextualize the impact in different modes and on different levels. In Song of Solomon, the concern is the delayed effects of a series of traumatic events associated with slavery and its aftermath on Milkman Dead, the grandson of a freed slave. For this essay, the traumatic impact also has a significant influence on Macon Dead, and it is that influence that perpetuates the frustration onto Milkman.
In the end, Anaya suggests that a person can draw from several cultural traditions to forge a more complex and adaptable identity, ardently referencing Catholicism and Paganism, vocations of significance to his parents, but superficially at Indian heritage. Though the novel invokes elements of Indian mythology, they are however never featured as prominent solutions to Antonio’s identity issues. The symbolism of the Virgin of Guadalupe seems to represent not only a syncretism of two groups, Spanish European and native Indians in Mexico but a syncretism of two groups that forge together then and now in future generations with no residual conflicting issues; they appear as one in the same and having nothing to offer separately.
Works Cited
Anaya, Rudolfo. Bless Me, Ultima. Warner Books. New York, 1994.
Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. ““Jason’s Indiana”: Mexican Americans and the Denial of Indigenous Ethnicity in Bless Me, Ultima.” Critique. Vol. 45, Number 2. 115-128. 2004.
Morrison, Toni. Song of Solomon. Everyman’s Library Knopf. New York, 1995.
Pocock, Judy. ““Through a Glass Darkly”: Typology in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon” Canadian Review of American Studies. Vol. 35, No 3. 282-298. 2005.
Rothberg, Michael. “Dead Letter Office: Conspiracy, Trauma, and Song of Solomon’s Posthumous Communication” African American Review. Vol. 31, Number 4. 501-516. 2003.
Storhoff, Gary. “Anaconda love’: Parental enmeshment in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon.” Style. Vol. 31, Issue 2. 290-310. 1997.
