Inclusive Spirituality in Song of Solomon
When slaves were brought to America they were taken from all they had known and forced to live in a land of dark irony that, while promising life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, provided them with only misery. In a situation such as the one in which the slaves found themselves, many people would rely on their religion to help them survive. But would slaves be able to find spiritual comfort within the parameters of a religion that had been passed on to them from the slaveholders? In Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, African-Americans struggle to find a spirituality that is responsive to their needs and that encompasses their experiences in a way that the religion of the dominant culture does not.
Song of Solomon deals with the African-American struggle to find a spirituality not defined by a religion of the dominant culture. From the beginning of the novel, Morrison alludes to Christianity with the names she chooses-Hagar, First Corinthians, Magdalene, and Ruth for example. However, the two main allusions Morrison draws on are the name "Pilate" and the name of the biblical book Song of Solomon.
In the narrative in which Pilate is named, Pilate's father, who can't read, lets the Bible fall open and points to a set of lines that look agreeable to him. It just so happens that the word spelled out by those lines is "Pilate," the name of the Roman who turns Jesus over to be crucified. The midwife attending at Pilate's birth asks the father if he really wants to name the child after the person who killed Jesus, and the father replies, "I asked Jesus to save me my wife," and he continues, "I asked him all night long" (19). Yet his wife wasn't saved, and Pilate's father feels...
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...sition of meanings shows both majority and minority readers that African-American spiritual experience, while touched by majority experience, does not have to be formed by it.
Song of Solomon deals with the struggle of African-Americans to find a spiritual avenue that is responsive to their needs and reflective of their experience. The text helps people to examine differing ideas, learn about different experiences, and become sensitive to various needs. If we are able to learn something from Song of Solomon, really learn something, perhaps life, liberty and happiness will finally find us.
Works Cited
Bloom, Harold, ed. Modern Critical Views: Toni Morrison. New York: Chelsea House Publishing, 1990.
Middleton, David. Toni Morrison's Fiction: Contemporary Criticism. New York: Garland, 1997.
Morrison, Toni. Song of Solomon. New York: Plume, 1987.
The book called Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison, deals with many real life issues, most of which are illustrated by the relationships between different family members.
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In Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison, the relationships between whites and blacks are a main theme. Throughout the whole novel Morrison adds her own opinions toward the race problems that the characters of Not Doctor Street experience. Poverty is another big issue in the novel and many of the main characters struggle financially. Money becomes a means of escape for many of the characters, especially Milkman and Guitar. For both men their quests for gold leaves them empty handed, but their personalities changed. Milkman’s quest was to be independent, especially since he was still living with his parents. Milkman however, was not poor. His family was considered one of the most financially comfortable black families in town. He was the spoiled son and it was galling but easy to work for his father, easy to be waited on hand and foot by his mother and sisters, far easier than striking out on his own. So his idea of freedom was not really one of working to support himself, but simply having easy money given to him, and not having to give anything to anyone in return. It was his father Macon Jr. who informed Milkman of the possibility of Pilate having millions of dollars in gold wrapped in a green tarp that was suspended from her ceiling. The hidden gold was in Milkman’s opinion his only ticket out of Not Doctor Street, his way of having his own possessions, being free from his parents lending hand. For Guitar it was a way to escape and fund his Seven Days mission.
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The primary function of the Negro spirituals was to serve as communal song in a religious gathering, performed in a call and response pattern reminiscent of West African traditional religious practices. During these ceremonies, one person would begin to create a song by singing about his or her own sorrow or joy. That individual experience was brought to the community and through the call and response structure of the singing, that individual’s sorrow or joy became the sorrow or joy of the community. In this way, the spiritual became truly affirming, for it provided communal support for individual experiences. Slaves used the characters of the bible, particularly the Old Testament,...
Freedom is heavily sought after and symbolized by flight with prominent themes of materialism, classism, and racism throughout Toni Morrison’s novel Song of Solomon. The characters Milkman and Macon Dead represent these themes as Macon raises Milkman based on his own belief that ownership of people and wealth will give an individual freedom. Milkman grows up taking this idea as a way to personally obtain freedom while also coming to difficult terms with the racism and privilege that comes with these ideas and how they affect family and African Americans, and a way to use it as a search for an individual 's true self. Through the novel, Morrison shows that both set themselves in a state of mental imprisonment to these materials
In Song of Solomon Toni Morrison tells a story of one black man's journey toward an understanding of his own identity and his African American roots. This black man, Macon "Milkman" Dead III, transforms throughout the novel from a naïve, egocentric, young man to a self-assured adult with an understanding of the importance of morals and family values. Milkman is born into the burdens of the materialistic values of his father and the weight of a racist society. Over the course of his journey into his family's past he discovers his family's values and ancestry, rids himself of the weight of his father's expectations and society's limitations, and literally learns to fly.
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Song of Solomon tells the story of Dead's unwitting search for identity. Milkman appears to be destined for a life of self-alienation and isolation because of his commitment to the materialism and the linear conception of time that are part of the legacy he receives from his father, Macon Dead. However, during a trip to his ancestral home, “Milkman comes to understand his place in a cultural and familial community and to appreciate the value of conceiving of time as a cyclical process”(Smith 58).
Toni Morrison’s novel, Beloved, explores the physical, emotional, and spiritual suffering that was brought on by slavery. Several critical works recognize that Morrison incorporates aspects of traditional African religions and to Christianity to depict the anguish slavery placed not only on her characters, but other enslaved African Americans. This review of literature will explore three different scholarly articles that exemplifies how Morrison successfully uses African religions and Christianity to depict the story of how slavery affected the characters’ lives in the novel, even after their emancipation from slavery.
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