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[T]he act of imagination is bound up with memory. You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. “Floods” is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. . . .
[L]ike water, I remember where I was before I was “straightened out.”
-Toni Morrison, “The Site of Memory” (1995)
In a recent conversation, I asked Toni Morrison about her novels’ recurring water imagery. Morrison’s answers focused exclusively on her second novel, Sula (1973). When conceiving Sula, the author says she intuited that “Nel’s images were another thing but Sula was water” (Morrison, personal interview). Years after the novel was published, the anthropologist Frances S. Herskovits informed Morrison that “Sula means water in Twi,” a Ghanaian language, and reminded her that South African artist “Miriam Makeba’s song, ‘Sula Me,’ means ‘Water Flow.’ ” Referencing her long-time home on the Hudson River as well as her birth in Lorain, Ohio “on Lake Erie,” Morrison suggested, moreover, that such grounding serves to inspire both the abundance of water figurations in the novel and the particular patterns of African-centered meanings they invoke.
Although Morrison’s cultural-specific use of water imagery has yet to receive sustained critical attention, several scholars have remarked on this curious feature in individual novels. Beloved’s water imagery, for example, has been described as “a metaphor for bodily life, sexual love, time and memory” (Morey 248); “a dynamic force for rebuffing oppressions” (Mori 136); “a crucial geographical marker [that] suggests a shared historic origin, beginning” (Wardi 2); and a sign for “connections between African practices and [fictive] events” (Levin 9). While their observations are provocative, these critics offer little insight into either the cultural contexts of such ideas or Morrison’s techniques for encoding them in the novel. Writing of Love, Susana Vega-González notes Morrison’s reliance on “West African and African American cultures, where water is a highly symbolic and multidimensional element,” but so cursory is her examination of these systems that she turns to “the postmodern traits of instability, fluidity,...