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Home<\/em><\/p>\n You can use the links below to navigate around the page.<\/a><\/p>\n Literature<\/a> History<\/a> Human Rights<\/a> If you are intersted, you can read Kirsten Shands’ response to Maxine Montgomery’s talk on\u00a0Home<\/em> HERE<\/a><\/p>\n Dr. Maxine Lavon Montgomery<\/strong>,\u00a0Professor of English\u202f,\u00a0Florida State University<\/p>\n Listen here, you from Georgia and you been in a desegregated army and maybe you think up North is different from down South.\u00a0 Don\u2019t believe it and don\u2019t count on it.\u00a0 Custom is just as real as law and can be just as dangerous.<\/p>\n Toni Morrison,\u00a0Home<\/i><\/p>\n <\/p>\n As much as any other novel in Toni Morrison\u2019s multiple-text canon,\u00a0Home<\/i>\u00a0(2012) engages a range of human rights issues in foregrounding the unjust conditions confronting the mid-twentieth world and the ways in which race or difference not only places individuals at a greater peril for such abuses, but also offers the communal responses essential to overcoming oppression.\u00a0 Frank \u201cSmart\u201d Money, the novel\u2019s amnesiac, drug-addicted Korean War veteran, suffers from more than Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Childhood memories of racial violence emanating from a dreadful southern past prove equally as debilitating as the terrors of war.\u00a0 While the challenges Money faces following his return to the United States are resonant with those of a global citizenry, Morrison\u2019s contribution to the conversation on basic rights and freedoms rests upon her skill in recovering a harrowing southern history, distilling from it both the tragic consequences of slavery and the strategies that have allowed black Americans to survive whole.<\/p>\n Morrison\u2019s reliance upon rhetorical structures of repetition, revision, and mimesis directs attention to the role of \u201crememory\u201d as a medium for reconstructing past occurrences.1\u00a0 The\u00a0disjointed narrative moves freely between stream-of-consciousness and first-person point of view, between past and present, destabilizing written, extant, or \u2018official\u2019 history in an inventive retelling of anterior events.\u00a0 Home invests Money\u2019s testimonial account with unprecedented authority in re-inscribing 1950\u2019s America, a little-known period, along with the individuals and ideological beliefs defining life during and after the Korean War.\u00a0 The ghostly images that haunt Money direct attention to the invisible constructions of racialized oppression and the insidious nature of those systems in the lives of black Americans.\u00a0 Whether through policing practices, housing regulations, or health care, custom or law, the institutional practices of the modern world frustrate the achievement on the part of raced citizens, complicating the search for an idealized home free of\u00a0externally-imposed\u00a0limits.\u00a0 Tropes of doubling reflect the psychic and physical wounds of war, race, class, and gender oppression, lending emphasis to the intersectional nature of trauma and the need for healing apart from conventional methods and traditional spaces.<\/p>\n Reminiscences of a mare, zoot-suited man, dismembered body parts, and Korean girl are reminders of the lingering effects of trauma in a New World setting.\u00a0 Memories of deaths on the battlefield exist together with recollections of an altercation involving a black couple on board a train en route to Chicago and merge with Money\u2019s guilt over his failure to save the lives of his war comrades.\u00a0 The troubled veteran\u2019s insecurities surrounding his ability to rescue his younger sister, Cee, emerges as the most salient challenge the protagonist faces in his attempts to reclaim the manhood white society seeks to erase.\u00a0 Money\u2019s sister falls victim to Beauregard Scott, a deranged Orwellian physician whose foray into eugenics summons the ambivalent role of science and technology in relation to black bodies.\u00a0 Scott\u2019s presence\u00a0brings to mind\u00a0a host of human rights abuses, including the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, medical experimentation on Henrietta Lacks and Harriet Washington, and, more recently, forced hysterectomies on immigrant women in United States\/Mexican border detention facilities.\u00a0 Such atrocities link fictional characters in an ever-widening circle of human rights abuses engulfing diasporic subjects across a cross-national geography.<\/p>\n Home is strewn with a host of bodies \u2013 in transit, scarred, marked, dismembered, and vanished \u2013 in a rehearsal of a dreadful trans-Atlantic history with Money\u2019s return to Lotus, Georgia assuming mythic dimensions as a heroic quest into the underworld.\u00a0 Billy, the youthful Math whiz that Money meets outside of Portland, is the victim of a drive-by shooting at the hands of a police officer.\u00a0 That the young boy\u2019s chief aspiration is to be a man signals Morrison\u2019s awareness of the threat of state-sponsored violence for black masculinity and the need for police reform.\u00a0 Money\u2019s arrest for vagrancy following his release from an army hospital, no less than Reverend Locke\u2019s reminder that hospital\u00a0doctors\u00a0experiment on black bodies, points to the failure of traditional institutions in addressing the complex issues among the inner-city poor and the practicality of diversity training as a means of creating a more equitable social system.<\/p>\n If the abuses Cee suffers underscore the challenges of finding a safe space apart from physical and psychic violence, her recovery in the company of a community of southern women points to home as a contested site, at once both a place of trauma and a locus for transformative change.\u00a0 Readers familiar with Morrison\u2019s fiction recognize Ethel Fordham as one in a long line of indomitable mother figures.\u00a0 Fordham is closely associated with the unscripted folk practices that have allowed diaspora subjects to persevere in the face of unrelenting abuse, and in a curious act of doubling resonant with novelistic arrangements of trans-human constructions, she becomes the mother that Cee no longer has.\u00a0 Cee, essentially childless, recovers her lost childhood in a symbolic restoration of the ruptured historical continuum underlying the mother-child dyad.\u00a0 Through the ceremonial practices associated with an agrarian homestead — cooking, quilting, gardening, and homeopathic cures \u2013 Cee achieves a new subjectivity apart from the wounds she has endured.<\/p>\n Morrison\u2019s tenth novel frames mirrored accounts of the return to an abandoned southern field as a literal and symbolic journey home, refigured mnemonically as a metaphysical site linked with ancient beliefs about the continuity of life and the sacredness of death, a place where the parts torn as a result of the trans-Atlantic journey are mended.\u00a0 Much like Song of Solomon\u2019s Milkman Dead whose quest for self-identity culminates at Solomon\u2019s Leap where he inters his grandfather\u2019s bones, Frank and Cee go back to the site of an\u00a0originary\u00a0trauma in a gesture acknowledging the vibrancy of a recovered past in constructing an alternative future \u2013 one where the dignity of\u00a0each individual\u00a0is an inviolable right.<\/p>\n Notes<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n The Korean War<\/b><\/p>\n Home<\/i>\u00a0tells the story of Frank Money, a 24-year-old African American veteran of\u00a0the\u202fKorean War\u00a0<\/a>\u00a0(1950-53), a ferocious and brutal conflict that\u00a0killed\u00a0over four million\u00a0people\u00a0in three years. For North and South Korea, the conflict was a civil war, a struggle with no possible compromise between two competing visions for Korea\u2019s future, with China and the Soviet Union supporting North Korea and the United Nations,\u00a0drawing its\u00a0principal\u00a0force\u00a0from the United States, supporting South Korea. Morrison does not overlook the war crimes\u00a0committed\u00a0against soldiers and civilians alike by both sides.\u00a0Some scholars estimate that\u00a070% of the casualties were civilians<\/a>, with episodes like the\u00a0Nogun-Ri Massacre<\/a>\u00a0not coming to light until years after the war.\u00a0While the war unofficially ended on 27 July 1953 in an\u202farmistice, the surviving soldiers and civilians would grapple with the long-term effects for years to come.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Green Books and Jim Crow America<\/b><\/p>\n While in the States, Frank makes use of\u00a0a\u00a0\u201cGreen Book\u201d<\/a>, part of the essential series of travelers\u2019 guides for\u00a0African-Americans\u00a0during the Jim Crow era.\u202fGreen\u00a0Books were created\u00a0and published by New York City mailman Victor Hugo Green from 1936 to 1966\u00a0as\u00a0guides\u00a0to services and places relatively friendly to African Americans. He\u00a0eventually expanded his\u00a0coverage from New York to much of North\u00a0America, and\u00a0founded\u00a0a travel agency.\u00a0African-American\u00a0travelers faced hardships such as white-owned businesses refusing to serve them or repair their vehicles, being refused accommodation or food by white-owned hotels, and threats of physical violence and forcible expulsion from whites-only \u201csundown towns.\u201d\u00a0This\u00a0radio documentary<\/a>\u00a0includes stories from people who lived through the Jim Crow period, and\u00a0this short video<\/a>\u00a0explores the importance of the Green\u00a0Books.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Medical Experimentation on Black Americans<\/b><\/p>\n Frank\u2019s sister\u00a0Cee\u00a0is subjected to involuntary medical experiments by her employer Dr Beauregard Scott,\u00a0who believes\u00a0in\u00a0eugenics.<\/a>\u00a0These experiments\u00a0leave\u00a0her\u00a0traumatized and\u00a0infertile.\u00a0The United\u00a0States\u2019 history and involvement in unethical human experimentation is longer and more extensive than many know.\u00a0The \u201cTuskagee Study\u201d<\/a>\u00a0is perhaps the most famous\u00a0instance. In 1932, 600 African American men from Macon County, Alabama were enlisted to partake in a scientific experiment on syphilis. The infamous 40-year study\u2019s goal was to observe untreated syphilis in black populations. The subjects were unaware of the experiment and were told instead that the treatments they were receiving were for bad blood.\u00a0In a lesser-known history of experimentation, more than\u00a060,000 people<\/a>\u00a0were sterilized without their consent in the US in the twentieth century, including a disproportionate number of women of color. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder<\/b><\/p>\n Despite the immense number of casualties, the Korean War remains relatively absent from most accounts of mental health and war trauma.\u00a0Ignorance at home contributed to widespread misunderstanding of\u00a0veterans\u00b4\u00a0condition,\u00a0and\u00a0they\u00a0were often deprived of\u00a0the\u00a0public space in which to grieve, as well as the emotional support and understanding they sorely needed.\u00a0Home\u00a0<\/i>mainly focuses on Frank Money\u00b4s\u00a0inability to\u00a0transition from\u00a0the\u00a0war to the racially divided\u00a0US.\u00a0He\u00a0has seen both of his friends die during the war and\u00a0has himself\u00a0committed a\u00a0horrible crime.\u00a0Confined in a\u00a0\u201cnuthouse\u201d after police pick him\u00a0after a violent blackout,\u00a0he only\u00a0remembers\u00a0\u201cthe free-floating rage, the self-loathing disguised as somebody else\u2019s fault.\u201d Frank continues to struggle with what we now\u00a0recognize as\u00a0Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and\u00a0through Frank, Morrison directs attention to\u00a0a great number of veterans who did\u00a0not\u00a0receive the treatment they needed, a\u00a0global\u00a0problem that\u00a0sadly\u00a0persists\u00a0today.\u00a0PTSD has\u00a0finally gained recognition<\/a>\u00a0in the US, but\u00a0about\u00a020 American\u00a0veterans\u00a0still kill themselves every day<\/a>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Children in War<\/b><\/p>\n As mentioned, Frank and his fellow soldiers are not the only ones who suffered from the\u00a0war. Frank, in a moment of guilt and panic, shoots\u00a0a young Korean girl offering sexual favors for rotten food. While this event speaks to the larger issues of war crimes, it also directly\u00a0depicts\u00a0the reality that children are especially vulnerable in times and places of combat.\u00a0UNICEF reports<\/a>\u00a0a three-fold rise in attacks on children in conflict zones since 2010.\u00a0Around\u00a030 million children<\/a>\u00a0remain displaced due to conflict.\u00a0Life-threatening hunger in war zones, which motivates the girl,\u00a0now\u00a0threatens\u00a04.5 million children<\/a>\u00a0under the age of 5.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Systematic Racism<\/b><\/p>\n Frank\u00a0and\u00a0Cee endure\u00a0systematic\u00a0racism, ranging from denied access to public places, to Cee being taken advantage of while in a position of financial and emotional vulnerability.\u00a0\u00a0Systematic\u00a0racism continues to produce\u00a0inequalities in homeownership and\u00a0segregated\u00a0communities<\/a>.\u00a0Police disproportionately kill black people. While only 13% of the US population is black,\u00a028% of people<\/a>\u00a0killed\u00a0by police are black, even though\u00a0they are less likely to be armed.\u00a0Bias in\u00a0healthcare algorithms<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0race-based inequalities in health-care access<\/a>\u00a0continue to make\u00a0black patients more\u00a0vulnerable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Home You can use the links below to navigate around the page. Literature History Human Rights If you are intersted, you can read Kirsten Shands’ response to Maxine Montgomery’s talk on\u00a0Home HERE Literature Dr. Maxine Lavon Montgomery,\u00a0Professor of English\u202f,\u00a0Florida State University Listen here, you from Georgia and you been in a desegregated army and maybe … <\/p>\n
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