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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Features/  Book review: God Help the Child
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Book review: God Help the Child

Toni Morrison's new book on how childhood traumas and skin-colour privileges can shape a human being

Morrison’s new book is set in contemporary times. Photo: Francois Durand/Getty ImagesPremium
Morrison’s new book is set in contemporary times. Photo: Francois Durand/Getty Images

Toni Morrison’s latest novel, God Help The Child, begins with the spite and venom of a mother rejecting her child. Lula Ann is born so dark that her mother, Sweetness, is shocked, unable to accept her “midnight black, Sudanese Black" skin tone. The effect of Lula Ann’s skin tone is such that it breaks apart the entire family, planting suspicion about her parentage, and begetting hatred among her parents. First, Lula Ann’s father blames Sweetness of cheating on him and later, Sweetness counter-accuses him, saying the extra blackness of their daughter “must be from his own family—not mine". This makes things “so bad he just up and left and I had to look for another, cheaper place to live." Sweetness, embarrassed of her child’s dark skin, makes sure landlords don’t catch a sight of her baby while she’s out looking for a new house. As for Lula Ann, her childhood is drenched with her mother’s rejection; during those early years, she would have done anything to earn her mother’s love.

As an adult, Bride is a successful professional, known for her style and beauty, but she also suffers from the guilt of falsely testifying, when she was a child, against a schoolteacher, Sofia, accusing her of molesting her students. As an innocent young girl, Bride doesn’t remember clearly what happened, but she remembers how everyone praised her for being courageous in court and how her mother pierced her earlobes and bought her new earrings as a prize for speaking the “truth". This is one of Bride’s earliest memories of being loved and valued by her mother, and it is suggested that she testified against her “monster" teacher because that is what her mother expected her to do.

More than a decade later, Bride has kept a tab on Sofia’s life and goes to meet her when she comes out on parole. She wants to help her start a new life, only to be beaten up mercilessly by a peeved Sofia. This is the first journey Bride would undertake to resolve issues from her childhood. The second journey is to Whiskey, California, in search of her lover Booker who has abandoned her, a rejection she is unable to deal with, a rejection that she equates with the devaluation she suffered from her parent while growing up.

Unlike most of Morrison’s books, this novel is set in contemporary times. Yet it is a novel that revisits themes from the past that are central to understanding American society. Bride’s unjust and tragic childhood that haunts her present and doesn’t allow her to enjoy her success as an entrepreneur is, at the end, a metaphor for the US’ history, drenched as it is in racism. A racism so pernicious that a skin tone can destroy lives even among the African-American community.

Aruni Kashyap is the author of The House With A Thousand Stories and an assistant professor of English at Ashoka University, Haryana.

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Published: 20 Jun 2015, 12:31 AM IST
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