community. Do they, and Morrison, seek redemption from -or of?- a
horrific past? Would they redeem people from a traumatic past -is it
deliverance they promise? Do they promise, rather, to redeem that past
by accepting it as a fatality and making it a fruitful of condition of
action? In either case does she, unlike Biblical forbears, trouble the
redemptive promises she makes?
When Nietzsche’s Zarathustra defines “my redemption,” he argues
that, since we can neither change nor escape the past, we must redeem
it, which means accept it, as Baldwin says, partly by the narrative
art that makes it meaningful, and partly by working-through loss and
resentment, which Freud also argues as he tries to distinguish
mourning and melancholia. The problem is an unredeemed past, which
haunts us, and the question is not how to get free of it, or be
redeemed from it, but how to make it meaningful and a condition of
possibility.
Baldwin speaks this way to provoke a national dialogue among
blacks and whites about a history he depicts as tragically repetitive:
only by redeeming the past in this Nietzschean sense can we take on
the unprecedented overcoming of white supremacy. But in a post-civil
rights era, after the failure of a second reconstruction, Morrison
does not openly speak to whites about a national fate, or use an idiom
of deliverance with the black community she claims to address. Her
view is post-colonial and diasporic: witnessing the haunting of her
people by a traumatic past they would forget, she dramatizes the
problem of coming-to-terms with it; by narrative art she would hold
her people together in a time of selective advance amidst ongoing
Convention