Intertextual, interracial, and inter-American; transgressors of traditional national boundaries and the borders of fictions and fact, Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, and Gayl Jones have helped undermine the parochialism of traditional literary studies with stories that empower black people and black culture, reaffirming marginalized black women from their subaltern position and bridging the American continent to create an “extended Caribbean,” stretching from Connecticut to Rio de Janeiro.
Writing from Brazil, Stelamaris Coser, a professor of American studies and American literature, has pulped enough of the environmentally unfriendly, politically correct dross exported from U.S. academe to mass-produce her own artificial rainforest. Coser demonstrates her thesis in 172 pages of text, divided into five chapters: an introduction to the authors, followed by a chapter for each author and a brief conclusion.
In the first chapter, the three wondrous writers are subjected to a steamy, tropical gush of accolades: they overstep “conventional closures of nationality, race, and gender” to “rewrite the boundaries between the American hemispheres” (p. 2); they are the voices of “all people marginalized in the ideal WASP nation” (p. 9); “these women revise the cataloguing of reality in narratives” (p. 19); “Morrison, Jones, and Marshall have introduced to literature a Pan Americanism that focuses on the empowerment of the voiceless and those subaltern all over the Americas” (p. 20); “they wish to avoid simplifications and stereotypes of any kind, even as they search for their ‘mothers’ gardens,’ their African roots, their myths, and the significance of their own womanhood within a space and culture that stretches beyond their home country to embrace the continent” (p. 26).
Then follows a chapter celebrating Marshall’s “ethnographic narratives,” stories that contain “a busy plurality of peoples, races, colors in a continous recreation of culture” (p. 27), which are lovingly condensed and praised. Likewise, in the next chapter, Morrison’s work is explicated; in particular, Song of Solomon (1977) and Tar Baby (1981). Whereas Marshall’s works are hawked as narratives from “the native’s point of view” (on page 23, Coser even testifies to their part in “revolutionizing contemporary anthropology”), Morrison’s challenge to “the hemispheric cultural order” (p. 82), her break with the Eurocentric tradition in U.S. literature, is composed by reclaiming and redefining American geography and history; by writing a “village” or “peasant literature” about the different social and historical black migrations and dislocations that occurred throughout the history of the United States (pp. 105, 81). Morrison connects literature with the realities of life, and so, by rewriting society, Morrison’s Song of Solomon can be read as a parable of black America, just as García Márquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude can be read as a metaphorical history of Latin America (pp. 82-106).
Whereas Coser connects Morrison with Márquez, in the penultimate chapter, she connects Gayl Jones with another “male and white-skinned” writer, Carlos Fuentes (p. 171). This is because Jones’s work concentrates on Brazil in the colonial era, “using Brazil as a foil to realities of races and gender in the United States” (p. 121). Jones turns black history into black autobiography by portraying characters who carry their past in their identity, showing, in Corregidora (1975), that “the wombs of women are archives” (p. 129), and in Song for Anninho (1981) that “a woman is ‘part past’ and ‘part future, too,’ so she is the sum of herself, her ancestors, and her children” (p. 152).
In her conclusion, Coser mentions that all the writings of Morrison, Jones, and Marshall are open-ended, and can be read differently with new meanings and significance. Her reading is “a reaffirmation of the beauty and complexity of literature by black women in the United States” (p. 173); it simultaneously empowers black people and black culture and reveals the hybrid nature of their history.
My reading of Coser’s Bridging the Americas, however, takes a critical stance toward her politically correct radical black feminism. Coser uses Morrison, Jones, and Marshall to represent all black women writers of her extended Caribbean without mentioning any other black female writers or writings. She writes links between Morrison and Márquez, Jones and Fuentes, showing literary influences, and thereby undermining her own thesis that there is an independent black woman’s literature.
This undermining continues with the argument that the trinity of writers explores issues of authenticity, ethnicity, and the origin of culture, breaking down stereotypes in these categories that persist in the literary and social worlds. This may be true, but somewhat hypocritically, Coser replaces one stereotype with another. Her argument can be summarized thus: black culture is not subaltern to white male culture because cultures are demonstrated by the authors to be hybrid, mixed, plural, diverse, and mythical; and the same writers point forward to the reaffirmation of African identity among people of the black diaspora. Thus I am left with the opinion that Coser has rewritten the literary world and redrawn its continental boundaries to construct a flawed thesis from an impulsive reading of inarguably illuminating novels.
