Diasporic Designs of House, Home, and Haven in Toni Morrison's Paradise

[T]he question of essentialism is no more than the question of interiority. Which is to say that identity theory is necessarily spatial theory. --Mark Wigley (388) Globalization, I want to suggest, must always begin at home. --Homi K. Bhabha (xv) What it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company. --Toni Morrison ("Nobel" 206) In April 1994, while working on the novel that was then titled War but would be published as Paradise (1997), Toni Morrison addressed an audience at Princeton University's "Race Matters" conference with a talk titled simply and evocatively "Home." Later reprinted in the collection The House That Race Built (1998), "Home" focuses on Morrison's ongoing attempt to expose and alter the conventional relationship between language and race--a relationship that most of her literary and critical work addresses. In the Princeton lecture, describing what will become the novel Paradise and quoting from the novel Jazz, Morrison employs the metaphors of space and place to think through these intellectual and aesthetic preoccupations: "In my current project I want to see whether or not race-specific, race-free language is both possible and meaningful in narration. And I want to inhabit, walk around, a site clear of racist detritus; a place where race both matters and is rendered impotent; a place 'already made for me, both snug and wide open'" (9). Imagining a "safe space for race," Morrison quotes extensively from the manuscript that will become Paradise. Both in the essay and in the section of the novel that she read, Morrison moves the idea of home from one contained within the house to an explicitly gendered, open-borders communal space--its freedom and security defined by the degree to which black women feel simultaneously safe, free, and connected: I want to imagine not the threat of freedom, or its tentative panting fragility, but the concrete thrill of borderlessness--a kind of out of doors safety where "a sleepless woman could always rise from her bed, wrap a shawl around her shoulders and sit on the steps in the moonlight. And if she felt like it she could walk out the yard and on down the road. No lamp and no fear. A hiss-crackle from the side of the road would never scare her because what ever it was that made that sound, it wasn't something creeping up on her. Nothing for miles around thought she was prey. She could stroll as slowly as she liked, thinking of food preparations, of family things, or lift her eyes to the stars and think of war or nothing at all. Lampless and without fear she could make her way. And if a light shone from a window up a ways and the cry of a colicky baby caught her attention, she might step over to the house and call out softly to the woman inside trying to soothe the baby. The two of them might take turns massaging the infant stomach, rocking, or trying to get a little soda water down. When the baby quieted they could sit together for a spell, gossiping, chuckling low so as not to wake anybody else. The woman could decide to go back to her bed then, refreshed and ready to sleep, or she might stay her direction and walk further down the road--on out, beyond, because nothing around or beyond considered her prey." ("Home" 9) An edenic home is not signaled here by a domestic (private, interior) place; rather, home is expanded to include the houses of other women and the interstices between those houses, a borderless space that encompasses both house and beyond. This same passage in Paradise abuts a description of the violation by the men of Ruby of what has become house and home as haven: the Convent. The men have come to contain what they perceive in the Convent as the "female malice" toward their communal home. In so doing, they repeat the very violent "disallowing" that generated the community's diasporic quest for home-as-haven in the first place (189). Since the publication of Paradise, many critics have analyzed the dynamics of this tragic repetition-with-a-difference of communal rejection. …