Of Life and Death: African Cultural Worldviews and Black American Survival in Toni Morrison’s song of Solomon and Amiri Baraka’s Slave Ship

abstract:This article provides a reading of Amiri Baraka’s play, Slave Ship: A Historical Pageant (1967) and Toni Morrison’s novel, Song of Solomon (1977). It argues that in both texts, written during the racial and political unrest of 1960s and 1970s United States, threats of violence and death toward Black individuals and communities allowed the formation of unique perspectives on life and death. Fundamentally, it was the belief that death is the beginning of life in another form, rather than its end. This belief and its corresponding ideas recall African worldviews and cultural philosophies, transported to the New World by enslaved Africans, which reject death as a state of powerlessness and hold that the dead, from the realms of the afterlife, have power to change the material world. When these ideas are articulated through Black nationalist discourses, death, and particularly suicide, is presented as a form of resistance. Specifically, self-inflicted death becomes a mean through which one contend for survival. The article argues that in their characterizations and various narrative strategies, both Morrison and Baraka interrogate the usefulness of these ideas by considering them as solutions to racialized injuries and injustices of post Emancipation Back American life.