Paradise

“Love is not a gift. It is a diploma. A diploma conferring certain privileges: the privilege of expressing love and the privilege of receiving it.”

Paradise is the seventh Toni Morrison novel that I have read and coincidently also the seventh novel she published. I decided to read Paradise as it is the third part of the Beloved trilogy (including Jazz). It is also the first novel published after her winning the Nobel Prize in literature. I initially hated it. The amount of characters and time jumps left my head spinning and I could not figure the book out. Had it been a lesser author I would have given up and called the book dumb, but it is Toni Morrison so it cannot be the book but I who is dumb. I watched/read several reviews/synopsis and it still did not click. It wasn’t until I watched her hour long interview after publishing that it all clicked. I say all this to say that not all art is meant to be entertaining. Charlie Parker once said “I am an artist, not an entertainer.” It is challenging art that often lifts a culture whether it be jazz, MMATBS, or avante garde film (Please watch Beau Is Afraid). With this incredibly dense and challenging text, we see Morrison let her hair down to build a novel you have to truly sit with.   

So What Had Happened Was…

The novel begins with the murder of a group of women outside of a small town called Ruby in an even smaller Convent. The rest of the book explains how these women came to live at the Convent and how their murderers came to justify such a heinous act. Ruby is a small Black town in Oklahoma organized by a group of eight families that searched for a place to live free of white supremacy. The town has done well, but is now dealing with a generation that is looking for something more. There are now cracks in what was once a tight knit community and the youth are looking to expand. The book takes place in the early 1970’s following the murder of several civil rights leaders. The youth of Ruby start to bend more toward Black Power sentiments and the elders of the town become concerned. The elders are challenged by a new preacher who has come to Ruby in order to modernize and contemporize the messages brought to the youth in this tiny all Black town in the middle of nowhere Oklahoma. Ruby is unprepared for the rapid change taking place in the world, in their town, and even in their religion.

Simultaneously, just out of town a group of women come to find solace in each other in a former convent. Mother Mary Magna is a Catholic nun who came to Oklahoma to lead an Indian Boarding School. Just as the Catholic church was kidnapping indigenous peoples from their homes, Mother Mary kidnapped a child from Brazil named Connie. Connie lives her entire long life with Mother Mary and now that the latter is toward the end of her time, Connie is keeping her alive. While Connie’s technique for keeping Mother Mary alive is mystical, it eventually fails and Mother Mary dies. That same day an interloper arrives. Gigi is a young free spirited woman who has come to Oklahoma searching for her lover, however instead she finds Connie laying on the floor of the convent mourning the death of the only Mother she has known since she was a small child. Not much later, another woman decides to return to the Convent after a brief departure. Mavis is on the run from her family who she believes has murderous intentions after the accidental death of her twins. Seneca arrives on the back of a truck hitchhiking for years after being abandoned by her sister (who is rumored to actually be her mother). The youngest of the group of women, Pallas, arrives unknowingly pregnant after escaping rapists.

The men of Ruby begin to blame the slipping of their power on the women of the Convent. They do so by high lighting how the women do not adhere to their strict patriarchal moral code (even though most of the men also do not follow it) and thus begin a satanic panic amongst themselves. They claim they warned the women to move by offering to buy the Convent, however their second visit is in the middle of the night with a plethora of fire arms. They shoot the white woman first (Morrison never clarifies who the white woman is). The women fight back, however all of them are presumably killed (their bodies are never found). The last chapter sees the women appearing to various persons from their traumatic lives. Connie and her real mother rest on the beach in preparation for all the work they have to do in Paradise.  

Aiight so boom…

Although this is probably the longest summary I have written I cant even begin to tell you how much I had cut in order to make the story digestible. I made connections while writing the summary and I’m sure I will make more connections with time.  However, I find it interesting that my thought for the theme of the book was so far, but so close to what Morrison states. As previously mentioned, Paradise is part of a trilogy of stories. Each story in the trilogy begins with a real life story (in this case a Brazilian raid on a convent that supposedly practiced Candomblé- a religion based in African spirituality). The stories then explore the concepts of love and murder. Beloved is the murder of a child out of love by its mother and Jazz is the murder of a teenage girl out of love by her much older suitor. However, I could not figure out what the love was that sparked the murder of the convent women. I kept coming back to the love of power, but never thought that fit into the trilogy. Power is key to an understanding of all the books, so it cannot be the sole love for Paradise. I am so happy that Morrison just plainly gave it to me in an interview. The love at the root here, is the love of religion. Markedly different from the love of God and a personal relationship therewith. I was not blind to the amount of Christian symbolism baked into the book (the promised land like search which led to the founding of the town, the lineage chapters where characters begot other characters, the latin phrases spoken throughout, and I’m pretty sure Connie met Jesus at some point). However, religion and a power schema can sometimes be hard to differentiate. It is important to state that Morrison explicitly states that she is not talking about the personal relationship that people have with their God, but rather the man made rules which are at the center of manys interpretation on how to reach God. As a Catholic myself, I have heard many agnostics or atheists discuss how religion is a control scheme. That has always fallen flat with me as Catholicism has aided in my personal relationship with God. But indeed 2 things can be true at the same time. There have been millions killed in the name of the pope alone, not counting other religious leaders. There can be a power schema which is separate from my personal relationship which not only can be critiqued, but should be critiqued. So I was sort of right in my thought process, but still very far off. I just needed a very simple distinction which I am only now making at 31.