Paradise
Bartelme, Elizabeth
FANTASTICAL & TRUE Elizabeth Bartelme oni Morrison's new novel, Paradise, is overpowering in its narrative drive, its poetic resonance, its unique approach to the black experience....
...Terrified of her abusive husband, she stole his Cadillac and lit out for the territory...
...The women of the Convent have changed everything and perhaps given their lives for this miracle...
...The affair is intense and it is clear that no good will come of it...
...Raucous music and dancing follow...
...Her books resonate with her passion and commitment to racial dignity and equality, but also with her immersion in a fictional world unlike any other...
...This is not a work in systematic moral philosophy...
...The narrative then flashes back to the forced migration of Negroes after the Civil War...
...Leaving Louisiana and Mississippi, they are rebuffed and rejected, even by their own people, until they reach the wide, treeless plain of Oklahoma and establish Ruby, a town that will belong exclusively to them...
...Consolata took her in...
...Yet we are drawn as moths to flames to the Bosnias and Rwandas...
...A lynching party is organized and the Convent and the town are plunged into a nightmare of violence and death...
...That is far too easy, he insists, as it doesn't reckon with the overwhelming fears created by the "disintegration of states," especially in light of the fact that there are no alternative institutions that help individuals to form and to hold secure civic identities...
...Among other novels, Morrison has written three major works: The Song of Commonweal 2 4 October g, 1998 Solomon, Beloved, and now Paradise...
...human beings---qua human beings-have none...
...So we get involved...
...And there is Pallas, the youngest, unbelieving that her mother and her lover could betray so cruelly...
...The basic tenets of Christianity and the hope of redemption and resurrection figure prominently in her story...
...The temptation of triumphalism may be great on our part: we respect human rights...
...This mix of "moral solidarity and hubris" intrigues Ignatieff, a frequent contributor to the New Republic and the New York Review of Books...
...Television is his preferred answer, a "new kind of electronic internationalism linking the consciences of the rich and the needs of the poor...
...Then women injured in body and spirit began to appear at the Convent's door...
...Wives have turned against their spouses, children answer back, no one listens to the preachers...
...Morrison introduces an enormous number of characters, and imagines immensely complicated relationships in creating the life of an entire town, from its founding to the disastrous events that force it to face up to harsh realities...
...Far better to appeal to these fighters as warriors than as human beings, for warriors have codes of honor...
...She does it with bravura and not for a moment do we doubt that Mavis is reunited with her daughter or that Gigi finds her father in prison...
...But perhaps not...
...Morrison is particularly good at portraying women--Mavis is heartwrenching, as is Seneca, who carves little gashes into her body...
...men strong and hard-working...
...Then the young girl from Ruby, claiming she'd been raped, and gradually more and more women...
...Elizabeth Bartelme, a long-time Commonweal contributor, lives in New York City...
...Ignatieff devotes five essays, here collected, to the matter...
...Why does the world we find seem so chaotic and terrible...
...This corruption must be wiped out...
...Consolata, now called Connie, has for forty years loved God faithfully and felt no need for any other love...
...children obedient...
...What impulses led us to supervise elections in Cambodia, try to protect the Kurds from Saddam, send UN troops to Bosnia, restore democracy to Haiti, bring the warriors to the table in Angola...
...The novel opens in 1974 with events of unmitigated violence and horror...
...The climax comes after a wedding in town when the guests from the Convent arrive in the old Cadillac, "looking like go-go g i r l s . . . Jezebel's storehouse raided to decorate arms, earlobes, necks, ankles and even a nostril...
...Mavis, for example, had accidentally killed her infant twins by leaving them in a car while she shopped for groceries...
...And so it was for the early generations...
...We were prepared for this response by Christianity and the radical equality of all persons in the eyes of God, an egalitarianism that fueled modern human-rights discourse and argument...
...Even her ghosts seem alive and lively...
...Morrison understands the suffering, the mythology and religion of the black community in a way that few writers do and allows her great gifts to illuminate them...
...OUR NEIGHBOR'S KEEPER Jean Bethke Elshtain ritish journalist Michael Ignatieff continues his tour through the rubble and ruin of late twentieth-century violence in his latest book...
...Here is the world according to Ignatieff...
...Meanwhile the town has begun to boil...
...with blazing eyes, war paint, and huge hands to rip up and stomp down this prison calling itself a town...a backward noplace haled by men whose power to control was out of control....She hoped with all her heart that the women were out there biding their time....Which is to say she hoped for a miracle...
...they do no such thing...
...Why do we feel that we must "do something" for strangers well beyond our own families, friendships, and nations...
...Ignatieff does well to warn us off a few of our pet evasions, the most common being that the tribal bloodshed in Rwanda, the upheavals in India, the disaster in Bosnia, can be summed up as "atavistic eruption of...incorrigible tribalism," an urgency we in the West long ago left off or never suffered in the first place...
...When Ruby's Deacon Morgan does public penance for his sins, it is miraculous to observe his change of heart...
...Wives were modest and loving...
...Pallas is not the only victim of betrayal...
...What she has produced here is food for the soul with exotic touches...
...First, we citizens of the settled West are everywhere, as "aid workers, reporters, lawyers for war crimes tribunals, humanrights observers"--on and on...
...This is a large menu, but Toni Morrison is a most accomplished chef...
...But suddenly she is thrust into a maelstrom of passion...
...These images of human suffering prick the conscience and animate a moral claim...
...She gives vivid expression to black bitterness, while at the same time subjecting certain middle-class aspirations based on white achievements to a subtle critique...
...That, in a nutshell, is Ignatieff's thesis and the text is devoted to its exploration...
...If, in Blood and Belonging (1993), he took us inside situations of internecine disintegration and war, here he aims to probe the mentality of Western nations that embark on intervention, aid, and assistance to those in trouble or those we think will likely be in trouble unless we assist in putting things right...
...Morrison moves into the fantastical at this point, a notably difficult exercise to bring off...
...Ignatieff suggests that we have no real idea of what it would be like to find ourselves in situations that resemble Chapter XIII of Hobbes's Leviathan, where life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short...
...Next came Grace, wanting to be called Gigi, looking for a man, but good-hearted under a tough exterior...
...There they are, reaching out from wherever they may be, to bestow forgiveness and loving kindness on those who have injured them...
...And as time passed, "the Convent," just down the road a few miles from Ruby, began to exemplify the wickedness of the world...
...And perhaps she got it...
...rather, Ignatieff gathers intimations, impressions, and narratives in a way that adds up to a decent road map if not a comprehensive encyclopedia...
...The Convent had been a Catholic school for Indian girls, but now the school was closed and only Consolata, the aging ward of the former mother superior, and the superior herself lived in the old residence...
...Clearly, the problems of other people concern us...
...There is a further question: how are our "zones of safety" and their "zones of danger" linked...
...To be sure, European imperialism embodied a particularistic definition of human obligations, dividing the world into "us" and "them," but the European heritage also contained the seeds of a powerful corCommonweal 2 5 October 9, 1998...
...She is, without doubt, one of our finest writers...
...For them, Ruby was to be a paradise on earth, their own utopia...
...The first discovery we make, then, is that "human rights have little or no purchase on this world of war...
...It is too much for the men of Ruby...
...In the past fifty years an ever more robust regime of human rights has grown up alongside the most horrific carnage...
...The man is an 8-rock and extremely handsome, as all the Ruby men are...
...Outside was full of temptations, bad news, evil...
...Finally the man moves on, leaving Connie devastated...
...And nobody went "Outside...
...Left behind is their friend Billie Delia, a Ruby woman wondering when and if her friends ~11 return...
...At this point, her lover's wife, Soane, visits the Convent and the two women, against all expectations, become friends...
...There, nine families of pure black blood--"the 8rocks" (from a term signifying the deepest, darkest level of a coal mine)--put down roots...
Vol. 125 • October 1998 • No. 17
