Locating the Ghost and the Work of Haunting in Toni Morrisons Fiction and Non-fiction Kama Maureemootoo

The Centre for the Study of Theory, Culture and Politics, Trent University, Peterborough, ON

Abstract By juxtaposing fact, fiction, theory, sociology and history, this paper develops a literary, social and political engagement with what is repressed, oppressed, and silenced. By putting in conversation theories from wide-ranging and often disparate fields, I attempt to cultivate a language with which to articulate spectrality and liminality. I study the work of haunting by reading Toni Morrisons fiction and nonfiction in order to examine Slavery and socially instituted racism as ways through which hegemonies repress and express ghostly presences.

traditional scholar does not believe in ghosts nor in all that could be called the virtual space of spectrality writes French thinker Jacques Derrida in The Specters of Marx. (Derrida 1994: 12) Derrida explains that it is often the position and the role of the litterateur to summon the repressed voices of ghosts, as exemplified in the revenant of the dead King of Denmark in Shakespeares Hamlet for instance. Traditional scholars do not interact with ghosts because of the demands of their discipline-specific training and their scientific grounding in ideals of the Enlightenment and modernity.1 The latter, argues Derrida, require that scholars believe in the sharp distinction between the real and the unreal, the actual and the inactual, the living and the non-living, being and non-being (to be or not to be, in conventional reading), in the opposition between what is present and what is not, for example, in the form of objectivity. (Derrida 1994: 12) By juxtaposing fact, fiction, theory, sociology and history, this paper develops a literary, social and political engagement with what is repressed, oppressed, and silenced. By putting in conversation theories from wide-ranging and often disparate fields, I attempt to cultivate a language with which to articulate spectrality and liminality. I study the work of haunting by reading Toni Morrisons fiction and non-fiction in order to examine Slavery and socially instituted racism as ways through which hegemonies repress and express ghostly presences. Derrida argues that facing specters arises out of an ethical commitment to learning how to live: if one is to learn how to live, it entails that one learns about life and death (ones own and that of others), and one also needs to learn about what happens in between life and death because between life and death is indeed the place of a sententious injunction that always feigns to speak like the just. (Derrida 1994: xvii) One needs to speak to ghosts and one needs to do so in the name of justice, and out of respect and responsibility for others who may not be here, who may have disappeared or who may not 1 For further consideration of the characteristics of modernity and their

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Keywords Gordon, Morrison, ghosts, haunting, hauntology, Derrida, spectrality, liminality

relation to physical and social sciences, see Bruno Latours We Have Never Been Modern (1993), where amongst others, he discusses distinctions between objects and subjects as entities of study, the Enlightenment rationale that requires that intellectuals restrict themselves to a particular disciplinary label, and questions pertaining to purification and translation as distinct ontological zones that separate the human and the non-human.

Playing the Field Conference Proceedings | Social Anthropology | York University 2009 be born yet. Encountering and living with specters is thus a politics of memory, of inheritance, and of generations (Derrida 1994: xviii) It is by acting upon this politics of memory and through her commitment to justice that sociologist Avery Gordon looks at the relationship between spectrality, social sciences, and the everyday life in Ghostly Matters. Gordon argues that though scholars and intellectuals abound in knowledge of world capitalist systems and repressive states, they insist on distinctions between subject and object of knowledge, fact and fiction, presence and absence, past and present, present and future, knowing and not-knowing... According to her, the liminal spaces between these distinctions are in need of examination and comprehension for they are [the] modalities of the exercise of unwanted power. (Gordon 2008: xvii) For Gordon, there is a complex relationship between what counts as reality and the modes of knowledge production and consequently there is a complex relationship between reality and the investigation of what remains invisible and excluded; hence does not form part of established forms knowledge. The ghost is a non-object that is constantly sliding and leaking between the dead and the living, the subject and the object, social reality and imagination, and the study of the ghost entails looking at a non-present presence that one does not know and that one cannot name. One does not know: not out of ignorance, claims Derrida, but because this non-object, this non-present present, this being-there of an absent or departed one no longer belongs to knowledge. At least no longer to that which one thinks one knows by the name of knowledge [The ghost] comes to defy semantics as much as ontology, psychoanalysis as much as philosophy. (Derrida 1994: 5) Therefore Derrida maintains that the study of haunting belongs to a realm of its own: to what he calls hauntology. (Derrida 1994: 10) Organized forces that appear removed from society, and systemic structures that seem long dead from everyday living still make their impact felt in peoples lives in ways that confuse established analytic and social separations. Identifying the spaces between these seemingly inexistent social structures and examining their articulation in everyday life and thinking is what consists a study of the work of haunting. Just like one does not know whether the ghost is living or dead, whether it is here or there, it is not always obvious to determine the uncanny ways in which this non-present presence slides between persons, between subjecthood. It can be difficult to ascertain how haunting permeates the intricacies of social relationships and affects complex personhood.2 For Freud, who was one of the first thinkers to attempt to systematically explain ghostly feelings, the uncanny is a property of something secretly familiar that has undergone repression and has then returned from it. (Freud 1971: 217-256) For Gordon, the social is ultimately what the uncanny is about: being haunted in the world of common reality. (Gordon 2008: 54-55) Gordon further posits that it is precisely the experience of being haunted in the world of common reality and the unexpected arrival of ghosts that troubles or even ruins our ability to distinguish reality and fiction, magic and science, savage and civilized and self and other. Haunting is one of the ways through which abusive systems of power can make themselves known. Their impacts can be felt, expressed and read in everyday life, and especially when they are supposed to be over with (Slavery for instance), or when their oppressive nature is ignored and denied (national security for example). For Derrida, hegemony is what purports to silence history and since hegemony is what organizes repression, it also confirms haunting. Derrida 2 Complex personhood is a strong axiom attached to Gordons belief that life is complicated. Complex personhood means that all people remember and forget, are beset by contradiction, and recognize and misrecognize themselves and others. (Gordon 2008: 4) Complex personhood also means that people suffer in different ways, they often remain wedged in the symptoms of their troubles, and they also often change and transform themselves. Besides, complex personhood also means that people tell themselves stories about themselves, about their troubles, their lives, their worlds, the societies they are living in; they understand these worlds through stories that negotiate the reality that is immediately available to them and the yearnings towards which their imagination strives.

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Playing the Field Conference Proceedings | Social Anthropology | York University 2009 asserts that haunting belongs to the structure of every hegemony and that a set of powers cannot be understood, studied and analyzed without taking into account its spectral effects. (Derrida 1994: 46) As a result, he argues that in any given situation where socio-political antagonisms are at play, a hegemonic force is always represented by a dominant rhetoric and ideology, which entails that something else remains hidden and unrepresented. Haunting itself is not the same as being exploited, traumatized, or oppressed though it may usually involve such experiences. For Gordon, haunting is an animated state that is physical, affective, visceral as well as psychological, and it is through this animated state that repressed or unresolved social violence makes itself known, sometimes directly and sometimes obliquely. Gordon uses the term haunting to describe those singular yet repetitive instances when home becomes unfamiliar, when your bearings on the world lose direction, when the over-and-done-with comes alive, when whats been your blind spot comes into view. (Gordon 2008: xvi) Thus, the appearance of ghosts notifies us that what has been concealed is in fact very much alive and present. Spectral figures leak from various forms of containment and repression and beckon us into looking at the trouble that is being blocked from our view. In this sense, Gordon argues that haunting differs from trauma in that even if both of them are frightening experiences and both register a certain harm inflicted through social violence, haunting is distinct because it produces a feeling of something-to-be-done. Haunting is part of the social world. To understand haunting is essential to grasp the nature of contemporary society and to change it. Studying haunting involves looking at the manifestation or incarnation of the spirit as it expresses itself in the specter. Derrida argues that the specter is a paradoxical incorporation, the becoming-body, a certain phenomenal and carnal form of the spirit. (Derrida 1994: 5) He maintains that the specter is a thing that remains difficult to name because it is neither soul nor body while it is at the same time both one and the other. He however claims that it is flesh and phenomenality that give to the spirit its spectral apparition. (Derrida 1994: 5) For Gordon, if haunting describes how that which appears to be not-there is a seething presence, the ghost is a sign, almost an empirical evidence that tells one that haunting is taking place. The ghost is not simply a dead or missing person, but a social figure, whose investigation can lead to that dense site where history and subjectivity make social life. In other words, the ghost or the apparition is one form, by which something which is lost, barely visible, or seemingly not here makes itself known or apparent to us. The way of the ghost is haunting, and haunting is a very particular way of knowing what has happened or is happening, argues Gordon and being haunted draws us affectively, sometimes against our will and always a bit magically into the structure of feeling of a reality we come to experience, not as cold knowledge, but as a transformative recognition. (Gordon 2008: 8) This structure of feeling can express itself in the most inarticulate experiences and symptoms, but they beckon to us and demand their due attention. Gordon posits that power is polymorphous and that it can come in various shapes, sizes and it can express itself in radically different ways: psychologically, bodily, it can be invisible, it can be visible, it can cause dreams of life and it can cause dreams of death. (Gordon 2008: 3) We now turn to study the work of Afro-American author Toni Morrison in order to look at the ways in which her novel, Beloved, structures haunting as a rememory.3 The narrative evokes an in-between, a liminal process that links an institution to an individual, a social structure and a subject, and history and a biography. (Gordon 2008: 19) Morrisons narrative is based on the story of Margaret Garner, the slave woman who in 1856 decided to kill her children and then herself instead of being sent back to slavery. The novel narrates two significant moments of violence that rejoin and mediate between the personal and the social: the killing of a baby by 3 Throughout the narrative, Sethe, who is haunted by the
ghost of her daughter whom she killed, uses the term rememory to refer to what she remembers and/or what she refuses to remember.

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Playing the Field Conference Proceedings | Social Anthropology | York University 2009 her own mother, and that of Slavery. The narrative interweaves itself between the individual and the private on the one hand, and the systemic and the public on the other. In this sense, the novel is about haunting. Toni Morrison further explores the space between life and death, between the past and the present, between Africa and America in the Atlantic: in the Middle Passage where many died unremembered. In an interview with Marsha Darling for the Womens Review of Books, Morrison states that, the gap between Africa and Afro-America and the gap between the living and the dead and the gap between the past and the present does not exist. Its bridged for us by our assuming responsibility for people no ones ever assumed responsibility for. They are those that died en route. Nobody knows their names, and nobody thinks about them. In addition to that, they never survived in the lore; there are no songs or dances or tales of these people (Taylor-Gutherie 1994: 247). She further adds that there is a necessity for remembering the horror, but of course theres a necessity for remembering it in a manner in which it can be digested, in a manner in which the memory is not destructive. The act of writing a book, in a way, is a way of confronting it and making it possible to remember. (Taylor-Gutherie 1994: 248) Toni Morrison is thus concerned with a politics of memory and inheritance and it is this concern that frames the structure and the content of Beloved as a beckoning of the ghost that demands America as a nation to remember. Beloved is not about Slavery with a capital S, it is not the story of Slavery, but it is, Morrison argues, about these peoplethese people who dont know they are in an era of historical interest. (Taylor-Gutherie 1994: 257) Beloved does not simply chronicle another slave narrative as seen in the story of Margaret Garner. Instead, the novel retells one story while summoning another, it narrates what is known while remembering what was erased but whose traces are still detectablethat of the transatlantic passage. The ghost in Beloved gesticulates, signals and sometimes mimics the unspeakable and what is not remembered i.e. those who died while crossing the Atlantic and never made it to America. What haunts 124, Bluestone Road and comes back to life is not only the ghost of the dead baby but is also the ghost of the sixty million and more to whom Morrison dedicates her novel. In this sense the novel presents a double-voice and a double-narrative: that of a slave child killed by her mother and that of a girl lost at sea. Morrisons fiction and her understanding of the world do not fall within the empirical, epistemological and ontological forms of dominant western theoretical traditions. Instead her writing mingles realism and magic, the world of humans and that of spirits, and her narratives also take into account the role of belief in shaping everyday life. In her own words, Morrison suggests, as a black and a woman, I have access to a range of emotions and perceptions that were unavailable to people who have neither. (TaylorGutherie 1994: 243) Morrison also speaks of the existence of the spectral and the way the latter shapes not only her personal beliefs but also her novels as exemplified in Beloved. She points out to the existence of the spirit world as a complement to the human one. As an African-American woman Morrison believes in the restless existence of ancestor spirits: These are spirits which have been largely unacknowledged and unaccounted for, as the dislocation of African peoples and individualsthe diasporahas swallowed the memory of their existence. (Taylor-Gutherie 1994: 246) I see in the work of Toni Morrison an access into understanding the everyday life of communities in North-America. While she faces the ghosts of the past and takes into account various forms of social violence, she also gives us a glimpse into the complex personhood of Black communities and the way they learnt to get-by and make-do with what was readily available to them in terms of beliefs, knowledge, material living, and imagination. I believe that the study of haunting can allow to us to understand race dynamics as they articulate themselves in the most oblique ways within a

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Playing the Field Conference Proceedings | Social Anthropology | York University 2009 society. While race dynamics are fraught with the binary opposition between White and Black, looking at what haunts whiteness and blackness each separately, is as crucial a task as looking at them in relation to each other. For Gordon, [t] he Middle Passage is the decisive episode that establishes the amnesiac conditions of American freedom: emancipation as enslavement. (Gordon 2008: 169) The concluding lines of Beloved remind us that [r]emembering seemed unwise and that [i]t was not a story to pass on. (Morrison 2004: 324) Yet, Beloved as a literary narrative leaves its readers with an affective sense of something to be done. For Toni Morrison, the reclamation of the history of black people in [America] is paramount in its importance because while you cant really blame the conqueror for writing history his own way, you can certainly debate it. Theres a great deal of obfuscation and distortion and erasure, so that the presence and the heartbeat of black people has been systematically annihilated in many, many ways and the job of recovery is () a serious responsibility and one single human being can only do a very tiny part of that, but it seems to me to be both secular and non-secular work for a writer. (Morrison in Taylor-Gutherie 1994: 225) This responsibility, I conclude, is not only that of the writer, but also that of the scholar, as posited by Derrida and Gordon, whose aim is to identify and re-summon a past that might have been silenced, but whose systemic violence still haunts contemporary society and needs to be re-membered. To accomplish this, I argue, the scholar needs to put into conversation wide-ranging and disparate fields to cultivate a language of spectrality.
Ltd. 217-256. Gordon, Avery 2008 Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Latour, Bruno 1993 We Have Never Been Modern. Catherine Porter, trans. Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Morrison, Toni 2004 Beloved. New York: Vintage International. Morrison, Toni 1993 Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and Literary Imagination. New York: Vintage International. Taylor-Guthrie, Danille. 1994 Conversations with Toni Morrison. Mississippi: Mississippi University Press.

Kama Maureemootoos research interests

lie at the intersection of (post)colonial thought, queer theory, nationhood, masculinity and the cosmopolitan and migrant history of the Indian Ocean in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Kama Maureemootoo completed his M.A. thesis, (Re)imagining the Past, (Re)mapping the Nation: Masculinity and the Nationalist Imaginary in the Indian Subcontinent, in 2011. He hopes to begin his doctoral research in a not-too-far future.

References

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Derrida, Jacques 1994 Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Peggy Kamuf, trans. New York: Routledge. Freud, Sigmund 1971 The Uncanny. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. James Strachey, trans. Toronto: Clarke Irwin Co.