The Importance Of Nature In Black Identity Construction

Toni Morrison's novels are imbued with concerns to history and black people's cultural identity. Song of Solomon marks a change of her literary creation to a more sweeping manner. Studying this popularly acclaimed novel can be helpful to understand her works and thoughts. Concern with Nature and Afro-American traditions is the essential theme of this novel. By presenting how black people's geographical location influences their identity, this novel shows the essential impact of environmental outlook on black people's identity. The African blacks were brought to the American continent by trade and experienced multiple changes of locations. After the Emancipation, black people had more freedom and migrated to the more democratic North. However, for Afro-Americans, the South is the root of their culture. There they preserve the African heritage, especially their reverence and communion with Nature. Although the industrial capitalist North indeed gave more opportunities for black people to obtain economic and political equality, it also eliminated the black tradition and caused more obstacles for black people's identity construction, deepening their colonized status. The absence of Nature in the North and black people's negligence of it caused great trauma in their psyche. In the novel, the lost black identity is restored in the southern traditions, showing the importance of Nature in this course. Combined with postcolonial and ecocritical studies, this thesis presents the close relation between culture and Nature and illustrates the immense space for postcolonial ecocriticism.