God Help the Child
Toni Morrison
[Knopf]
In her first novel, 1970’s The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison explores the maelstrom of societal forces that converge in a father’s rape of his own child. She returns to the subject of child abuse in God Help the Child, in which such cruelty seems to hide around every corner – in playgrounds, sunny afternoons, and even the alley behind one’s home. The far-reaching tendrils of abuse, subtle and pernicious, cause Morrison’s characters to be suspended in perpetual childishness: this is perhaps most manifest in the character of Bride, an arrestingly beautiful businesswoman whose ‘blue-black’ skin earned her perpetual coldness from her lighter-skinned mother, Sweetness. As a child Bride misbehaves with hopes of receiving a slap or any other morsel of her mother’s touch; as an adult, she resorts to shallow relationships and casual sex for approval. When she meets Booker the tide seems to change – but only until his abandonment has her turning back into ‘a scared little black girl’, embodying, in her transformation, Sweetness’ admonition that ‘what you do to children matters’.
Bride’s gradual regression to a pre-pubescent body is one of several quasi-fantastical plot elements, the rest of which can be rather literally heavy-handed. The structural and symbolic violence of Bride’s world is physically enacted against her: her face is bashed in by a vengeful parolee, her leg is broken, and her skin scarred and bruised and stripped away. Coupled with the novel’s full dose of rape, murder, and freak accidents (fires, car crashes), the story can read like somewhat of a soap opera at times. However, it is precisely Morrison’s willingness to tread the unstable territories of prolonged tragedy that sets her apart. Her unflinching exploration of what happens to a spirit beaten down from childhood by the heinous forces of racism and violence, couched in the beautifully evocative language she is known for, makes this continuum of calamities a compelling, and oddly uplifting, read.
Words: Mònica Tomàs
