Can we aspire to transnational feminist alliances in a world devastated by war, the brutal legacy of colonialism, and the continued aggression of U.S. foreign policy? It is daunting, indeed, to envision how we might do so when the pull to the anonymity of our racialized world with the hierarchies it imposes is so great. Given the cemented meaning that fuels preconceived identities in the form of our “natural attitude” to one another, we can only do so by taking upon ourselves the vertical drama of a new poetics of consciousness given to us as a challenge in chapter 4 by Harris. A new poetics allows us to see each other differently and possibly create new ways of belonging together. In this chapter, I will offer a reading of Toni Morrison’s Paradise through a lens using the Kantian interpretation of the sublime. We will thus be returned to some of the key features of my discussion in chapter 1 on the various roles of the imagination in Kant’s critical philosophy.
Let me review, briefly, the difference between the use of the imagination in cognition and its deployment in reflective and aesthetic judgment. The ground of our knowledge is the transcendental imagination in which we intuit our world as always already in space and time. Remember, the transcendental imagination gives us the world of presentation and with it, all things that can be known. The cognition of objects, which is for Kant what constitutes determinate judgment as such in the first Critique, is carried out through a mediation in which the judgment consists in matching up the categories of the understanding with the raw material supplied by sensibility. Kant famously argues that this determination demands a schematization of the objects to be subsumed under the categories carried out by the imagination. The schema is a mediating representation that, to use Kant’s words, is “homogenous with the category, on the one hand, and with the appearance, on the other, and that thus makes possible the application of the category to the appearance.”1 We need to be able to imagine the abstract content of a concept so that we can adequately apply it to its various manifestations that, despite seeming differences, instantiate the concept. Kant provides the following example:
The concept of dog signifies a rule whereby my imagination can trace the shape of such a four-footed animal in a general way, i.e., without being limited to any single and determinate shape offered to me by experience, or even to all possible images that I can exhibit in concreto.2
Kant refers to this schematic representation of a dog as a template, or as he sometimes calls it, a monogram, for dog-hood, that links the concept to our sensible images of such an animal. In this case, understanding delimits the role that imagination can play. In other words, the cognition of objects serves a mediating role central to determinative judgment, in that its schemata make possible the subsumption of particulars under concepts, that is, dogs under dog-hood. Understanding legislates the form of representation, and the schematizing aims of imagination are limited by the aims of cognition. Although this may seem abstract and far from feminist struggles, we can begin to deepen the profound suspicion that some feminists have of knowledge through concepts, including any concept of woman or even of women, because the imagination, in order to cognize the group, will inherently schematize and idealize the factors that are to be given substantiality in the concept itself. In other words, if we had a concept of woman, we would limit our imagination in terms of how and who we might be through the reimagining and resymbolization of the feminine within sexual difference. If feminism is ultimately to concern itself with women as subjects, then there is a deep sense in which we do not want to seek in advance concepts that would limit the imagination in its portrayal of the richness of that subjectivity.
Aesthetic reflection in Kant, in both the beautiful and the sublime, alternatively does not ascribe objective properties to things as determinate judgment does, but rather cultivates a subjective relationship between imagination and its object. Although I will not spend much time on the aesthetic judgment of taste in this conclusion, I do want to emphasize that the difference between the judgment of taste and the judgment of the sublime does implicate a different role for the imagination. There is a specific sense in which the formalism of Kant’s idea of aesthetic judgment in taste limits the imagination. Apprehending and reflecting on an object’s form will necessarily involve exploring the temporal and spatial relations among its various parts, since the transcendental imagination is in the end what gives us our world. If the spatial and temporal form of an object spontaneously accords with the faculty of concepts, which is inevitably dependent on the form of space and time, then that form gives pleasure in the sense that we spontaneously feel the unity of our faculties. Concepts, it is important to note, are not brought to bear directly on aesthetic judgment; instead the imagination freely plays over the object so as to feel the harmony of cognition with sensibility, the harmony between the free imagination and the lawfulness of understanding, which takes us back to the attribution to a beautiful object of a purposiveness. This purposiveness is ultimately produced as a new way to regard the object as a formal unity that invents the harmony we seek out. It does so by creating in us a feeling that we can freely reach an accord between our faculties by allowing an imagination not properly determined by any concept, yet one that must still synchronize with the limits of the understanding if the object is to please us as we sink in the possibility that our understanding does not need to alienate us from our sensibility. On this reading, Kant’s famous appeal to a sensus communis, so as to confirm the intersubjective validity of aesthetic judgments, does not take us to any established community or communities. Instead, it appeals to a possibility that is available to all of us, precisely because we are rational creatures that think through the ground of the transcendental imagination, and therefore the feeling of pleasure we get from the harmony of our cognitive powers can be agreeable to all such creatures because it points to a cognitive relation common to all.
A judgment of the sublime, in contrast to beauty, is generated in us when an object defies the imagination’s effort, an effort required because of its relationship to reason to present our world as a whole and the objects in it as comprehensible. Here we need to briefly review why affinity has transcendental purchase in Kant. Kant asks how particular instances are made possible by the preconceptual work of productive imagination. His answer is as follows: “The basis for the possibility of the manifold’s association, insofar as this basis lies in the object, is called the manifold’s affinity.”3 The imagination proceeds through three principles of synthesis. These three principles are apprehension, reproduction, and recognition. The synthesis of reproduction provides the possibility that presentations are associable and comparable as such. In other words, if we did not reproduce an image that differentiates between dog-hood and cat-hood, we would not know the actual difference between dogs and cats. As a result, we could not recognize this specificity and difference between the two creatures. We need reproduction in order to get the recognition we need to organize what we apprehend under categories. Affinity is the preconceptual relationship that we imagine as there between diverse objects so that we can not only know objects, but also know the relationships between them. But the transcendental purpose of affinity is that it gives us a world in which objects are in relation to one another, and it is precisely the conceptually undetermined relationships that take us back to imagined connections of the relata to which we now give a nonconceptual and new and different sense. But this “whole,” precisely because its basis is preconceptual, can never itself be fully conceptualized. Reason reaches the limits of its aspiration exactly as it attempts to encompass all the faculties, and ultimately to find its way to fully rationalize the schemata. Sublime imagination and reason ultimately confront each other as what is unbounded by comprehensibility. In the mathematical sublime, the failure of the imagination to comprehend what is being presented to it turns on its inability to retain an ever-growing volume of apprehension. Apprehension explodes comprehensibility, and the imagination falters before what it is asked to take in. Under the breakdown of the imagination, we find ourselves instead confronted with an overwhelming, indeterminate multitude of connotation. The meanings that sublime reflection ascribes both to artworks and to aesthetic ideas more generally must remain indeterminate and open-ended, precisely because they can never be schematized or even harmonized as the imagination invents an object that seems to us as one with our understanding and our sensibility. If the judgment of taste links, but does not fully determine, imagination’s relationship to the understanding, sublime reflection links the imagination to the ideas of reason, ideas which presume a totality that Kant’s whole critical work demands that we apprehend as beyond the reach of the understanding, precisely because the understanding itself is grounded in intuitions that give us a preconceptual world which is at the same time the basis for all conception.
Sublime reflection produces uncanny relations among phenomenan that seem to have no obvious connection, and by so doing, opens us to a differential affinity of relata, an affinity that denies schematization or determination by any definite concept. In the sublime, everyday concepts fail us and we must struggle to make a different kind of sense of the uncanny. The imagination necessarily fails us in sublime reflection, and as we have seen, reason ultimately has to appeal to the imagination in its aspiration to totality, therefore we can only trace out the meaning of the ideas of reason through aesthetic ideas that can at best represent them, but never capture them. In Kant, it is the tension between reason’s aspirations, imagination’s failure of comprehension, and our respect for both that yields the feeling of sublimity. In determinate judgment, we subsume particulars under universally valid concepts, universally valid for creatures who have to think through the world in terms of time and space, and whose cognitive faculties are inevitably divided in the tasks they serve under the rubric of the understanding. In the case of aesthetic judgment, however, there are no concepts under which to place particulars. I need to stress this, because some commentators have suggested that aesthetic reflection broadens our mind, and indeed broadens our concepts. But a broad concept would still be a concept in Kant, and it is precisely not the task of aesthetic judgment to generate concepts.
It is this uncanny sense of ourselves and the affinity of our affective relationships that I believe is a crucial aspect of feminism. Ethical feminism, as I have defined it, inverts the relationship between the positive and the ethical in this sense. Ethical feminism promotes the recognition that who and how we have been as women who make our own histories will always slip beyond the grasp of our current conceptual knowledge precisely because of the way in which hegemonic patriarchal conceptions of women make the imagination of us as those subjects next to impossible.4 What I mean by the ethical, here, is precisely the demand put on us, and particularly those of us who are white women in the rich countries of the north, to recognize that when we seek to “understand” women, and this so easily happens when we try to “comprehend” women of other cultures, we fall all too easily into the inherent objectifying tendency in a modernity that always understands others as objects of our knowledge, and judges them by the categories and concepts through which we grasp our world.5 Ethical feminism is, for me, an ethical, aesthetic imperative which demands that we take seriously the vertical drama suggested by Harris as well as accept our responsibility to constantly question our habits, to spin new extensions of webs of meaning, and to respect the open efflorescence of significance given in such a rich field of ontic orientations that we now face in our world. Can we dream that the overwhelming complexity of the divergent ways in which human beings “world their world” and still aspire to another dream, that of a reconciled humanity that aspires to the idea of Kant’s ultimate idea of reason, the idea of humanity itself is possible? Perhaps we can, if we dare to dream of paradise.
In Toni Morrison’s novel Paradise, a diverse group of women, Mavis, Gigi, Seneca, and Pallas, find their way to a former religious school once under the leadership of Mary Magna. As the novel begins, Mary Magna is still alive, although fading under the burnout of extreme old age, the flame of her life fanned by her devoted friend Connie. Connie was a “stray” child found by Mary Magna in Brazil and brought to this country to serve with her in her religion school. The women who wend their way to the convent are running away from the past, a world in which they were ensnared in patterns of abuse and neglect. They do not share anything in common other than that they are runaways. We know from the first sentence of the novel that one is white; later on, we are told that Connie is Brazilian. The convent is made up of women who literally straggle in, and after Mary Magna’s death, Connie retreats into her basement, only rarely engaging the women who have set up their home under her roof. The convent is outside a town called Ruby formed by a devoted group of black men, devoted to their God and to each other as “8-rocks,” whose almost blue-black color is read by them as a symbol of their racial purity. An illegitimate affair between Connie and one of the founders of Ruby is not the only contact that the convent has with the town. Women from Ruby find solace and female treatment there. And indeed Connie first comes to terms with the extent of her spiritual power in raising from the dead one of the young men who had driven out along the road beside the convent.
Ultimately, as we will see, Morrison is contrasting two very different views of identity. The men of Ruby can clearly not conceive of these women as other than a threat to their identity, their God, and their town. For them to maintain their identity, the women must be driven out, if not simply killed. But under the spiritual rituals led by Connie, who renames herself Consolata Sosa, the women find a way to a different identification with each other, an identification other to strays and runaways, now transformed by what it demanded, or more accurately did not demand, of them. The women gaze at Consolata as she calls them into the ritual space that will “reform” them as belonging to a new covenant in the convent. The women are drawn in, even as they question Connie:
What is she talking about, this ideal parent, friend, companion in whose company they were safe from harm? What is she thinking, this perfect landlord who charged nothing and welcomed anybody; this granny goose who could be confided in or ignored, lied to or suborned; this play mother who could be hugged or walked out on depending on the whim of the child?6
In her tales, Consolata Sosa remembers the world of African religion, and more specifically of the Candomble houses out of which she came and allows herself to return to by claiming her own spiritual power and the traditions in which it is rooted.
Then, in words clearer than her introductory speech (which none of them understood), she told them of a place where white sidewalks met the sea and fish the color of plums swam alongside children. She spoke of fruit that tasted the way sapphires look and boys using rubies for dice. Of scented cathedrals made of gold where gods and goddesses sat in the pews with the congregation. Of carnations tall as trees. Dwarfs with diamonds for teeth. Snakes aroused by poetry and bells. Then she told them of a woman named Piedade, who sang but never said a word.7
For those unfamiliar with the rituals of Candomble, Consolata takes her “children” that are in disarray into an embrace that can hold them all by allowing them to return to the site of their trauma and to reimagine themselves apart from it. Morrison’s symbolism here is that Consolata is the daughter of Yemoja who is, in the Yoruba pantheon, both the goddess of the ocean and the patron orisa of the Gelede Society. The Gelede Society, in the original Yoruba religion that comes from Nigeria, celebrates the powerful women witches of the world, who had both the power to help build society and the power to destroy it. Yemoja is the ultimate manifestation of female spiritual power, and therefore metaphorically at least, she is the “greatest witch of all.”
Consolata’s first command to the women is that they draw a template of themselves. As we have seen in Kant, a template or a monogram is a schematization of what is shared in common by the objects of the manifold so that it can be intuited as things within the conceptual unity. But here the template is where the women will draw what does not yet exist, and what cannot be conceptualized. In current psychoanalytic language, each woman has suffered a severe wound to the imagined image of herself through profound trauma. In the template, they will draw out a new self, one no longer hunted and haunted; but they cannot do this without being returned to the self before the trauma which is, at least psychoanalytically conceived, the no-self. This imagined no-self, this chance to go it again and become a person differently, and perhaps a person at all for the first time, is what Morrison describes in the undergoing of each woman of a shared ritual. The first step in that ritual is the loud dreaming in which their identifications blend with one another.
That is how the loud dreaming began. How the stories rose in that place. Half-tales and the never-dreamed escaped from their lips to soar high above guttering candles, shifting dust from crates and bottles. And it was never important to know who said the dream or whether it had meaning. In spite of or because their bodies ache, they step easily into the dreamer’s tale. They enter the heat in the Cadillac, feel the smack of cold air in the Higgledy Piggledy. They know their tennis shoes are unlaced and that a bra strap annoys each time it slips from the shoulder. The Armour package is sticky. They inhale the perfume of sleeping infants and feel parent-cozy although they notice one’s head is turned awkwardly.8
But the loud dreaming is ultimately a call to draw out a different self from within the ritualistic connection that now supports them in a new promise of who they can be. They turned their templates into artworks in which their reimagined body is now reinterpreted by the others as giving expression to a history and to an experience that had no capacity to make itself into their world before they drew it and then explained it.
Life, real and intense, shifted to down there in limited pools of light, in air smoky from kerosene lamps and candle wax. The templates drew them like magnets. It was Pallas who insisted they shop for tubes of paint, sticks of colored chalk. Paint thinner and chamois cloth. They understood and began to begin. First with natural features: breasts and pudenda, toes, ears, and head hair. Seneca duplicated in robin’s egg blue one of her more elegant scars, one drop of red at its tip. Later on, when she had the hunger to slice her inner thigh, she chose instead to mark the open body lying on the cellar floor. They spoke to each other about what had been dreamed and what had been drawn. Are you sure she was your sister? Maybe she was your mother. Why? Because a mother might, but no sister would do such a thing. Seneca capped her tube. Gigi drew a heart locket around her body’s throat, and when Mavis asked her about it, she said it was a gift from her father which she had thrown into the Gulf of Mexico. Were there pictures inside? asked Pallas. Yeah. two. Whose? Gigi didn’t answer.9
In her initial opening to the ritual that forms the new covenant in which each woman’s personhood is supported, Consolata appeals to a unity of the good and bad mother, a unity again which was the sublime affinity, not a concept, of what these figures are or even should be in some limited moral sense. “Here me, listen. Never break me in two.”10 This imagined affinity of the “good and bad,” Eve as Mary’s mother and Mary as the daughter of Eve, symbolizes the bringing together of parts of themselves buried in self-blame that each woman had buried in order to survive her traumatic past. Described at the end of the ritual, the women are returned to a kind of joy in their relationship to the great waters, rivers, and oceans that Consolata invokes in her ritual. These dancing women have found themselves in a reimagined covenant in which each is returned through ritual to an originary rebirth out of the water that first contained them.
Consolata started it; the rest were quick to join her. There are great rivers in the world and on their banks and the edges of oceans children thrill to water. In places where rain is light the thrill is almost erotic. But those sensations bow to the rapture of holy women dancing in hot sweet rain. They would have laughed, had enchantment not been so deep. If there were any recollections of a recent warning or intimations of harm, the irresistible rain washed them away. Seneca embraced and finally let go of a dark morning in state housing. Grace witnessed the successful cleansing of a white shirt that never should have been stained. Mavis moved in the shudder of rose of Sharon petals tickling her skin. Pallas, delivered of a delicate son, held him close while the rain rinsed away a scary woman on an escalator and all fear of black water. Consolata, fully housed by the god who sought her out in the garden, was the more furious dancer, Mavis the most elegant. Seneca and Grace danced together, then parted to skip through fresh mud. Pallas, smoothing raindrops from her baby’s head, swayed like a frond.11
Morrison evokes the possible viewer who might have stopped by the convent during the ritual and seen the women in the magnificence of their freedom. The viewer would have been puzzled by what she saw; so uncanny and so unfamiliar would be the sight of these women who were at peace with each other and with themselves, and with the rain. As Morrison writes, maybe this visitor would have had the flash of an insight that the convent women were no longer “haunted.” The viewer confronts the sublimity of these women now imagined to be free and as she does so, confronts what is most unfamiliar—a covenant based not on restrictive identities who have to abject what is unlike themselves but on the promise of a reconciled life with each other and with nature, and what is promised in the sublimity of that imagined reconciliation if not paradise.
This covenant worked out in ritual certainly does not proceed under the concept of woman. Yet the ritual itself explicitly turns on the “material” of the feminine imaginary. Famously, Jacques Lacan defined the feminine imaginary as what was pushed under by the symbolic order, leaving only the residue of the psychical fantasy of woman in the place of the ultimate object of desire, the mother-Other which is always there for the subject. The fantasy split off into “good” and “bad” woman so as to tame that unbearable desire, is exactly what Consolota puts into play at the beginning of her ritual. Her reminder, Eve as Mary’s mother, Mary as the daughter of Eve, is to seek to reclaim both good and bad woman in the process of reimagining the significance of both. Simple identification along the lines of good and bad is as a result broken up, and the women can then own up to, and live differently with, the “bad” girl they have always abjected in themselves. Lacan, of course, would not have believed that such a ritual could heal, nor that women could ever live beyond being haunted by the inexpressibility of their feminine sexual difference, and hunted by men if they try to break up the symbolic order, so as to alter themselves in a new field of desire and significance. 12 Yet, of course, Lacan had no experiences with the rituals of the Yoruba-based religion, or more specifically, of the Candomble traditions and practices of Brazil. Morrison invites us to imagine such a ritual in all its sublimity. And yet it is not just the ritual and loud dreaming that is sublime; it is the full acknowledgment of each woman by every other of the intensity of her suffering that is itself sublime. Time itself is lost as the women engage in the reworkings of their feminine imaginary. As Morrison writes:
January folded. February too. By March, days passed uncut from night as careful etchings of body parts and memorabilia occupied them. Yellow barrettes, red peonies, a green cross on a field of white. A majestic penis pierced with a Cupid’s bow. Rose of Sharon petals, Lorna Doones. A bright orange couple making steady love under a childish sun.13
Sublime reflection allows us to explode the sedimented meanings we associate with the name woman, and even with the name women. In a deep sense, what matters is the singularity of each woman’s past; and yet that past only comes to mean for each woman as she reimagines herself through turning her template, her idealized person, into something she now shapes.
Does race and ethnicity play out in this reidentification? We know that not all the women are black. So if there is race and ethnicity in the convent, it remains as the marks on the flesh which themselves have to be reimagined, in the remaking of who they are, together. If we wanted to use psychoanalytic terminology here, the women are remaking themselves through their sexual and racial difference and not despite it. I have distinguished elsewhere between identity, position, and identification.14 In ritual, these women explicitly play with the meaning of the identification “woman” as it comes to them in all the bits and pieces of the images of the feminine imaginary. But they also have an identity for the men in the town as women. They are positioned as the ultimate bad women, who dare witchcraft and threaten with the power of their orisas, the phallic-identified stability of the town. This convent, with the fear and awe it inspires, had to be a woman’s convent. It was only such a convent that could threaten the men of Ruby, precisely because their covenant, their paradise, is incompatible with the safe and stern phallic home the men have identified as their only hope for redemption from a racist world. Their terror of the women explodes in the meeting the men held to take the decision that these women had to be hunted down and removed of all their contaminating influence, so that the town could once again be in its purity.
It was a secret meeting, but the rumors had been whispered for more than a year. Outrages that had been accumulating all along took shape as evidence. A mother was knocked down the stairs by her cold-eyed daughter. Four damaged infants were born in one family. Daughters refused to get out of bed. Brides disappeared on their honeymoons. Two brothers shot each other on New Year’s Day. Trips to Demby for VD shots common. And what went on at the Oven these days was not to be believed. So when nine men decided to meet there, they had to run everybody off the place with shotguns before they could sit in the beams of their flashlights to take matters into their own hands. The proof they had been collecting since the terrible discovery in the spring could not be denied: the one thing that connected all these catastrophes was in the Convent. And in the Convent were those women.15
The specificity of these women’s lives is neither reducible to some overarching concept of woman, but nor is it based in a simple notion of their difference. Difference, in other words, is not a spelled-out, marked, feminine difference that can be used as a standpoint of critique for universalist humanist notions, or even as the basis of some attempt to ascribe universality to the concept woman. As Adam Thurschwell and I wrote in 1987,
In a related manner, the gynocentric critique of universalist feminism is a critique of the identity category that (mistakenly) accepts this category for what it claims to be. We fully share the motivations that inspired this critique, but have attempted to show that understood properly, the stark choice between universality and absolute difference is a misrepresentation of the interlocking interplay of sameness and difference. Furthermore, it is a false choice: the gynocentric response reinscribes itself in the same repressive logic of identity that it criticizes in universalist feminism. We condemn a reified gender differentiation not in the name of some “universal human nature,” but because it would confine us to certain socially designated personality structures, and because it misrepresents the self-difference of the gendered subject. It restricts the play of difference that marks every attempt to confirm identity.16
We have seen that for Kant, aesthetic ideas seek to express what can never be conceptualized, including the ideas of reason themselves. In Morrison’s novel, paradise evokes a number of aesthetic ideas that force us towards new insights and visions which defy total comprehension. These insights push us toward drawing out new networks of affinity, including the affinity the women find in their being-together in their dance in the rain. But Paradise, in the most profound sense, is itself an aesthetic idea. Its promise is clearly beyond any notion of it. But it is just such a promise that Morrison evokes as always a possible new covenant, a new way of relating to nature, and a different, ethically altered humanity. Paradise, as itself an aesthetic idea, can only be brought into shape as ultimately what denies the very process of shaping itself. Imagination falters before what it most seeks to envision. And so as we strive to evoke Paradise as an aesthetic idea, we also have to acknowledge that all such expressions are imperfect, that they break down under the very demand of what the aesthetic idea longs for but cannot realize in any form of knowledge. Paradise is even irreducible to the great Kantian ideal of humanity, which regulates us as moral creature as we aspire to live together in the kingdom of ends. For in this beyond, we not only find the magnificent sternness of the moral law, a sternness that the men of Ruby believe themselves to ever try to live by; we find the happiness of the rain dance, we find what Adam Thurshwell and I defined as reconciliation: the coincidence of love and freedom. This is a promise that Consolata envisioned with Piedade’s songs. Piedade’s song and Consolata’s insight allows her to ascend to the practice of healing, and even of breathing life back in to what appears to be dead. For in a sense, is that not what the ritual gave to the women? Another vision of who they might be together, and with the world around them? As an aesthetic idea, always incomplete in its imagined affinity that leaves human beings at peace with all that is, paradise undermines the very shapes it seeks to actualize.
Was paradise ever there? Did the story happen? Was Consolata really a witch who could raise the dead? I ask you to imagine with me, if you can, that other space of our being-together, through an affirmation of our sexual difference that itself never claims to be anything other than a vision that as it glimmers, necessarily fades if we try to hold on to it too strongly. If we listen hard enough, can we hear Piedade’s songs, even if there is no actual sound that goes with them? When Richard Misner, the politically inspired minister of Ruby, returns to the convent with Anna to see what is left, they find nothing there. Consolata was shot; so was the “white woman.” The others supposedly ran into the garden. Anna and Richard take some eggs from the henhouse and then they see it, or rather sense it. Anna said she heard a door close; Richard saw a window. On the way home, they laugh about who is the pessimist, who the optimist. But both “knew” that for a minute they had had insight, and that insight led them to the sublime questions that they, and of course we, rarely want to confront. “Whether through a door needing to be opened or a beckoning window already raised, what would happen if you entered? What would be on the other side? What on earth would it be? What on earth?”17 Perhaps paradise. Do you dare to open that window? Can you bear to hear Piedade’s song? Morrison herself has dared to open that window, returning us to an initial imaging of Piedade, Yemoja, and her circle in the Gelede Society, Osun and her enchanted waters, which always allow us to see ourselves differently. Did this initial imagining force the story on the writer? Does it make us confront unbearable hope and dread as we open the window or shut the door? Do we dare to try to imagine the sublimity of that story of paradise, told through figures of women of overwhelming power? If we do so dare, then it will be our story, our imagining, and our struggle. And if we do dare, then there is hope because for a moment at least, we have insight into the full force of the promise of paradise. I leave Morrison with the last word:
In ocean hush a woman black as firewood is singing. Next to her is a younger woman whose head rests on the singing woman’s lap. Ruined fingers troll the tea brown hair. All the colors of seashells—wheat, roses, pearl—fuse in the younger woman’s face. Her emerald eyes adore the black framed in cerulean blue. Around them on the beach, sea trash gleams. Discarded bottle caps sparkle near a broken sandal. A small dead radio plays the quiet surf.
There is nothing to beat this solace which is what Piedade’s song is about, although the words evoke memories neither one has ever had: or reaching age in the company of the other; of speech shared and divided bread smoking from the fire; the unambivalent bliss of going home to be at home—the ease of coming back to love begun.
When the ocean heaves sending rhythms of water ashore, Piedade looks to see what has come. Another ship, perhaps, but different, heading to port, crew and passengers, lost and saved, atremble, for they have been disconsolate for some time. Now they will rest before shouldering the endless work they were created to do down here in paradise.18
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), A138/B177.
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A131/B180.
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A113.
Drucilla Cornell, Beyond Accommodation: Ethical Feminism, Deconstruction, and the Law (New York: Routledge, 1991).
Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).
Toni Morrison, Paradise (New York: Plume, 1999), 262.
Morrison, Paradise, 262–263.
Morrison, Paradise, 264.
Morrison, Paradise, 265.
Morrison, Paradise, 263.
Morrison, Paradise, 283.
Jacques Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, book 20 (New York: Encore, 1998).
Morrison, Paradise, 265.
Drucilla Cornell, Between Women and Generations: Legacies of Dignity (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 98–100.
Morrison, Paradise, 11.
Drucilla Cornell and Adam Thurschwell, “Feminism, Negativity, Intersubjectivity,” in Feminism as Critique: Essays on the Politics of Gender in Late-Capitalist Societies, ed. Drucilla Cornell and Seyla Benhabib, 160–161 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
Morrison, Paradise, 305.
Morrison, Paradise, 318.